Reading Games and Activities

Adventures of Sydney
http://www.cyberkids.com/cw/mul/sydney/index.html
The Adventures of Sydney is an interactive story. You decide where you will go next on each page by picking among the choices. Change the adventure of Sydney and her cat as you read.

Adult Learning Activities (CA Distance Learning Project)
http://www.cdlponline.org/ 
The purpose of this site is to help adults/english learners improve basic skills like reading and spelling using a variety of topics. Quizzes, matching games, and sound clips reinforce new words. There is a separate section for teachers and adult educators that can be accessed by selecting the "For Adult Educators" link at the top of the homepage. The stories are based on real life situations and past television news stories.

BBC Education: Words and Pictures
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/wordsandpictures/index.shtml
This site was designed as an online companion to the BBC TV series Words and Pictures. It focuses on different vowel sounds. To reinforce the featured sound, each of the site's sections includes related activities. The sections include Poem Pack, Print and Do, Word and Pictures Gallery, Snap It, and Drag 'n' Spell. Suitable for K-4.

BearTime
http://www.BearTime.com/

Bembo's Zoo
http://www.bemboszoo.com/
This is an interactive site with graphic illustrations of zoo animals which create a sound when clicked on. It requires flash and gives you the option of downloading it if you don't have it.

Between the Lions
http://pbskids.org/lions/
This web site was developed to match the PBS literacy series using the same title. However, it is an excellent elementary literacy resource on its own. It contains stories, online games and printable offline activity sheets for beginning readers ages 4-7. Content was developed with early literacy standards in mind, aiming to motivate children to read and write and to teach them foundational skills such as phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge and basic concepts about print.

Bitesize Games
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize/
From BBCSchools comes this charming set of simple games in two categories, Literacy and Numeracy, and each category offers a dozen different games, such as rhyming words, punctuation, etc. The games are simple enough for younger students, and the clever graphics make them suitable for older ESL students.

Clifford the Big Red Dog
http://www.scholastic.com/clifford/flash.htm
Engage your students in this highly interactive site all about Clifford! There are activities involving games, stories, coloring pages, crafts, letter writing, painting, and music. There's even a special section, filled with teaching and learning ideas, for parents and teachers. (This site has been updated since last featured.)

Egyptian Mad Libs
http://neferchichi.com/madlibs.html
Students enjoy making funny stories. Here they can enter nouns verbs and adjectives to make funny stories about the Egyptians.

Fake Out
http://www.eduplace.com/fakeout/
Students from K-8 will improve their vocabulary while having fun with this vocabulary game by Education Place.

Fractured Fairy Tales
http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/fairytales/
Students learn about fractured fairy tales and write their own with Read, Write, Think’s Fractured Fairy Tales interactive educational activity. Read a short version of Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, or The Princess and the Pea. Next, choose what part or parts of the story you want to change – the characters, plot, setting, point of view, problem, or ending. Then, use those changes to write your own fractured fairy tale.

FreeReading
http://www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Main_Page
This is a free reading intervention site geared towards students grade K-3 complete with literacy activities and lessons/ideas links. Includes teaching tools such as picture cards and a word list generator. Share your own teaching ideas or get some from other experienced teachers.

GameGoo
http://www.cogcon.com/gamegoo/index.cfm?bhflver=5
"GameGoo is home for fun, stick-with-you educational games that help students develop early reading and language skills, adentified as important language arts building blocks in state curriculum standards. The games are based on education and literacy research, full of rich stories and characters to engage students in learning adventures."

Goodnight Stories
http://www.goodnightstories.com/
Lots of fun activities and stories. You can Read-a-story, Hear-a-story, Decide-a-story, Fill-in-a-story, Finish-a-story, and more. Activities include Games, Coloring, Wildlife Fact Files, etc.

Grandpa Tucker's Rhymes and Tales
http://www.grandpatucker.com/
This site is dedicated to sharing the "love of language." Students can learn to make their own rhymes, read stories, and listen to music.

Interactives: Elements of a Story
http://www.learner.org/interactives/story/
Explore the elements of a story using the well-known Cinderella story as source material. Learn about setting, character, sequence, exposition, conflict, climax, and resolution. The site includes an animated retelling of the story and a 14-question assessment.

Into the Book
http://reading.ecb.org/
Students improve their reading comprehension skills on the educational website Into the Book. Learn about using questioning, evaluating, inferring, prior knowledge, making connections, synthesizing, summarizing, and visualizing skills through mini-lessons and interactive activities.

Lazy Bear
http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-lazy-bear.htm
It's spring and the animals in the forest are waking up. But where is Bruno the bear? Read along as you listen to an animated story about a bear to find out what happens. Then print words and activities to go with the story. From LearnEnglish Kids, for children who are learning English.

Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun
http://www.vocabulary.co.il 
Interactive games with multi-level and multi-subject choices to help students learn vocabulary words. Over 100 topics with 4,500+ words. Games include: Hangman, Word Search, Language Match Game, Vocabulary Quiz.

Pearson Longman: Online Reading Tests
http://www.pearsonlongman.com/ae/marketing/sfesl/practicereading.html
Although scholastic publisher Pearson Longman produced these practice tests for Limited English Profiency (LEP) students in grades one through eight, they'll be valuable to a much larger audience. "The reading tests provided here are a combination of multiple choice, short-answer, and long-answer questions. The short-answer and long-answer questions are designed to have students process the information in the passage, analyze it, and organize it for the answer. In this way, these practice questions test students' analytical abilities, not just comprehension."

Scholastic Kids
http://www.scholastic.com/kids/index.htm

Sight Words with Samson
http://www.sightwordswithsamson.com/sw/sight_words.asp
Here are 28 word lists, ranging from very easy to challenging, presented as games. Each game takes players through four vocabulary-building drills, all with excellent audio reinforcement. This is an excellent site for EFL/ELL classes, although the graphics might be a bit too "young" for older students. However, it is a worthwhile individual activity for students needing extra practice.

Silly Books
http://www.sillybooks.net/default.htm
Silly Books is a wonderfully fun and educational reading site for kids. It includes animated cartoons, comics, children's music, picture books, puzzles and games. Parents, teachers and especially students will enjoy this site. It provides a wealth of reading materials for children. The books are animated, colorful and include music, sound effects and voices. As children follow along, the words are highlighted as they are read aloud providing hours of educational fun. In addition to the books, children will find cartoons, music, puzzles, games, and jokes. The classroom section provides some lesson plans for teachers and other support materials.

Starfall
http://www.starfall.com/
Starfall is a Web site dedicated to helping students learn to read. The site contains very useful resources for this purpose, including interactive books and games that contain that contain sound. Teachers can also request free writing journals for students (Starfall even pays shipping!) that reinforce the content and purpose of the site.

Story Place Pre-School Library
http://www.storyplace.org/preschool/other.asp  
The StoryPlace Pre-school Library is full of great activities to explore. Each one provides a theme, a story, an online activity, a paper-based activity, suggested readings, and a parent activity that can be used in the classroom.

Vocabulary Games
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games_vocab.htm
March 31 is the deadline for registration for SAT and Subject Tests. These five Sheppard quizzes are great for SAT vocabulary preparation. Two of the games draw from a vocabulary of 720 commonly-tested SAT/GRE words. Each round consists of twenty select-the-definition questions, so you can play over and over again, with very little repetition. The three non-SAT games are an expert-level vocab game (with words like "opprobrium" and "eldritch"), and quizzes on computer and medical terminology.

Word Frog
http://www.arcademicskillbuilders.com/games/frog/frog.html
Practice matching antonyms, synonyms, and homonyms, with Word Frog, an animated self-scoring activity, with three different levels of difficulty. After you finish the game and click End, you are taken to the Arcademic Skillbuilders page where there are other similar skillbuilding games.

Wordly Wise Wordbuilder Games
http://www.hoadworks.com/gamemenu.htm  
This site contains a huge gallery of word games to build your vocabulary. The first two games are on an Internet server and are therefore blocked by Websense, but the rest of the games are all available.

Word Wizard
http://readwritethink.org/materials/wordwizard/
Students choose a book to do interactive spelling and thinking activities.