freereading.net: terrific free K-3 reading resource

Good morning everyone,

Came across freereading.net the other day thanks to Diigo user Jim Farmer. It is a very neat and very different resource focusing on reading literacy instruction (not interactive games or other computer-based activities). It’s open source and completely free. Quoting from the About page:

Free-Reading is an open source instructional program that helps educators teach early literacy. Because it is open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. Free-Reading contains a 40-week scope and sequence of primarily phonological awareness and phonics activities that can support and supplement a typical kindergarten or first grade “core” or “basal” program.

This site offers an impressive array of detail lesson/activities in the following areas:

• Phonological Awareness
• Letter Sounds
• Letter Writing
• Sounding Out
• Word-Form Recognition
• Irregular Words
• Reading Connected Text
• Letter Combinations
• Irregular Words II
• Advanced Phonics

For example, check out “Counting words in a sentence.” It’s got clearly worded, easy-to-understand, detailed instructions with, best of all, a video of the skill being taught. How cool is that! Links at the bottom of each page take you to related activities, allowing you to hyperlink your way around the site based on your areas of interest or need. You can even get a view of the entire 40-week program here. This is the kind of site that would be great for the start of a new year. Perhaps sharing it now will benefit some teachers who will be planning over the summer!

Hope this helps,

-kj-