The Top 10 Digital & Audio Book Sites for Kids

Books are expensive and I've found that while many of my students don't have access to a large book collection at home, they have access to technology. 

There are so many online digital libraries out there that share a wealth of children's books right at your fingertips. But the truth is, many of them are pricey, very nonuser-friendly, and don't provide a very good book selection.

I've done some research and piloted numerous online digital libraries in my classroom the last couple of years and today I share "The Top 10 Digital & Audio Book Sites for Kids." All sites are user-friendly, teacher-tested, and hassle-free!!

Storylineonline.net 

This site features tons of award-winning titles you'll recognize.

• Free
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• App Available
• Books read by famous actors

 Tarheelreader.org 

Features books on just about every imaginable topic you could think of.

• Free
• User-friendly
• No audio
• Reliable search engine

Storyberries.com

• Free
• User-friendly
• No audio
• Search by age, topic, time, or conversation

Getepic.com

I LOVE Epic! It's my definite fave and my students too! Choose from many eye-catching titles, customize your library, and create your own avatar.

• Free for teachers
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• App Available

 Youtube.com

Did you ever think to look on You Tube for read alouds? It is often my go-to for read-alouds. Just search your book and choose a video.

• Free
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• App Available
• Friendly search engine

Schooltube.com

You can also find read-alouds on School Tube.

• Free
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• Friendly search engine

Education.com

I love Education.com for lessons, activities, interactive games, and songs...but did you also know they have over 70 audio books on their site? Education.com limits the number of downloads with the free membership, but downloads are unlimited with the premium membership.

• 3 free downloads per month
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• Common Titles

The premium membership is well worth the investment. You can read all about the perks of education.com in a blog post I wrote here...AND membership is 50% off right now!

 Farfaria.com

Farfaria is another one of my favorites! While it is not free, subscriptions are as low as $4.99/month and as low as $20/year for teachers. That's not very much at all, when you consider 1-2 books can easily cost a whopping $20. 

• $$
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• App Available
• Thousands of stories

 Onemorestory.com

Another phenomenal audio book site! Although, not free, worth every penny when you take into consideration the price of books. 

• $$
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• App Available
• Thousands of award-winning titles
• "I can read it" mode for struggling readers
• Word lists and vocabulary components

Meegenuis.com

Another fabulous audio book site! This subscription is only $4.99 a month, which again is much cheaper than purchasing hardcover books. You can also try it free for 30 days.

• Free 30-day trial
• User-friendly
• Audio Books
• App Available
• Award-winning titles
• Customize your library

When you look at the price of books these days, you can't beat these prices for providing good quality books to your children. Or try out the sites that are free! Audio books are engaging to children, and the other great thing about audio books is that children are exposed to modeled reading. 

No more excuses that they didn't have a book to read at home!

No more spending exhausting hours and valuable time searching for good digital/audio book sites! I've done the work for you and I know you and your children will find all of these sites very enjoyable.

You'll Want This Teacher Resource

I can't believe I've been teaching for almost 11 years and just recently discovered education.com! Boy have I been missing out! This site is a teacher's paradise! Not only do they have over 20,000 worksheets available for download...check out every thing else they offer!

Over 350 Interactive Games

You can even download and print Workbooks!

The hands-on activity section is one of my favorites and with over 3,500 activities to choose from, there's sure to be something for everyone.

Over 1,300 Lesson Plans!

Nearly 400 exercise downloads to give your students additional practice!

And the songs...I LOVE the songs! Quickly pull up a song to help your students learn any concept.

There's even over 70 interactive stories! Can it get any better?!

Yes it can!!!! If you follow The Bender Bunch, then you know....WE LOVE SCIENCE! Just look at these Science experiments! Just this section alone is a Science teacher's paradise, with nearly 1,700 experiments to choose from!

There's also educational and parenting articles and navigating the site is super user-friendly. You'll need to create a free account to use Education.com and you can do that here. The free basic membership gives you unlimited access to the Science projects and educational articles, but limits your monthly access to the other resources. Every month your allowed downloads is reset though. So if you'll only be using the Science or needing just a couple activities a month, the basic membership will be perfect for you.

However, if you want unlimited access and want to get your hands on all of these fabulous resources any time you want, you can upgrade to a premium membership. 

Get all the worksheets, workbooks, interactive activities, lesson plans, exercises, songs, and stories you want and need, any time you need them, and in one place with the premium membership. It is sooooo worth it! 

I also like that if you're only interested in the workbooks, you can purchase the workbooks for $4.99 each without having to upgrade to a premium membership. So there's lots of great options to fit everyone's needs.

Education.com granted me permission to share a sample activity from the activity section on their site with you. I think I'm going to use it for our Multicultural Family Art Night at school this year. It would also be a great activity for teaching feelings and emotions. I love that for our special needs kiddos, there is no wrong or right when it comes to expressing yourself through art.

Sample Activity:

Create a Cubist Self-Portrait

Is your child a budding artist? Support his creative nature by helping him to learn about art styles, and work on art process explorations. The cubist movement began in the twentieth century with the creation of abstract, broken up works of art. Translate this into a fun activity for young students by encouraging cubism-inspired art made at home.

The cubist collage self-portrait activity will help your child to better observe, analyze, and reconstruct his own imaginative thoughts. Additionally, it reinforces basic math skills such as geometry. It promotes self-awareness, and can even help build aesthetic awareness. Moreover, he'll learn a little art history while he's at it!

What You Need:

• Construction paper (at least two pieces)
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Crayons, oil pastels, or markers
• Mirror

What You Do:

1. Ask your child to take a look in the mirror. What does he see? How does the face change with each expression of emotion he makes?
2. Now it's time for your child to create a pencil drawn self-portrait. This can be a close up of just the face, neck, and shoulders or a full length portrait.
3. Have your child color in the pencil self-portrait with crayons or makers. For added fun, try oil pastels. Using these soft, crayons-like utencils is a great way to introduce your child to different artistic tools.
4. After the self-portrait is finished, have your child cut the drawing into pieces that form geometric shapes. Make sure that the pieces are not too small.
5. Have your child rearrange and reassemble the cut-out shapes of his portrait. Then, have him glue them down on a blank sheet of construction paper. He should rearrange them in a way that makes a completely new abstract portrait. Let his imagination run wild! There are no limits to the ways in which he styles his composition.
6. Enjoy your child’s abstract cubist collage!

Try extending this project by asking your child to create several self-portrait collages. Each work of art can be varied by altering the facial gestures, their arrangement, and even the colors used. Ask your child to choose colors that connect with the emotion in the drawing. For example, a sad picture may be blue while a happy portrait could be bright yellow.

Which resource categories are you most excited about? Check out all the categories on your education.com tour here. 

Great Finds Sunday!

Time for another "Great Finds Sunday!" Here are my great finds for the week!

I've been working hard with the speech pathologist at my school to help some of my students that have unintelligible speech with their articulation, as well as working with students on "WH" questions! After some searching, I found these two awesome sites! 

Therasimplicity requires a subscription fee, but is so worth it! You can choose from their thousands of pre-made activities or Therasimplicity gives you the ability to create and customize your activities! You can create worksheets, communication boards, game boards, flashcards, and much much more! This video will give you an overview of some of the neat features!

While a yearly subscription is listed as $189, I was able to get it at a discounted rate of only $49. I signed up for the 14-day free trial and the next day a rep emailed me and informed me that they were offering a discount for teachers in CCSD of only $49! SOLD! 

Sign up for your free trial today{here}! If you like it, I would suggest contacting them to see if you can get a teacher discount too!

Here is another AWESOME site I discovered and it's FREE!! This site has a plethora of materials for practicing articulation skills with your students! Even if you're not focusing on articulation, but focusing on specific sounds, you'll love this site! You can print flashcards specific to the sounds you are working on! Check out the articulation materials {here}. 

My class has been doing a lot of hands-on science! My students just love it and can't wait for Science Time every day! But I'm beginning to run out of experiments.........at least until I found..........

Steve Spangler has some really awesome science projects just for kids! I think I have my science covered now at least through March, thanks to Steve! Check out some of his cool science experiments and videos {here}.

Erin Condren is offering 30% off of her teacher planners, plus a free set of pens with order! Enter teacherlove at checkout! But hurry....deal ends tonight at midnight!

Get 26 free St. Patrick's Day printables from "Teaching Blog Addict" {here}!

If you're not following "Right Road Kids" on Facebook, you'll want to! This lady LOVES giving things away to teachers and classrooms! Giveaways almost every week! She calls them "Simple Acts of Kindness for Teachers." Today you can win a $50 Barnes & Noble giftcard! This giveaway ends in a few hours, but even if you missed it, follow her {here} for the next "Simple Act of Kindness." This lady is just amazingly generous!

Really Good Stuff is having an "I Spy Sunday Giveaway" on their blog!

Just guess this item to be entered!

Enter {here}! This giveaway doesn't end until the 19th, so you have plenty of time if you missed the giveaways above!

Do you have some great finds to share? Grab my linky button, add it to your post, and link them up below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Some Great Finds in a day of Cyberspace!!!

What a lazy day!!! I have literally spent my entire day reading blogs, entering giveaways, pinning, searching ideas for my chair, and on facebook! I wouldn't call it unproductive though, because I found some great things along the way to share with you! 

But first, did any of you enter the K-3 grab bag giveaway that Educents was having?? Well, I WON!!!! And I was so excited to get my package Saturday! 

Look at everything I got!

 Here are my favorites!!!

If you haven't invested in any of these interactive Smartboard programs from Lakeshore......then do! They run 15-20 dollars each and are well worth it! I already have two, "Letter of the Day" and "Phonics Tic Tac Toe" and am excited to add the "Bubble Pop" to my collection!

Lucky for you.....the "Solar System" one is not really practical for my students. So I think I'm going to include it in my blogoversary giveaway that starts on the 1st.

Some other goodies that were in the box.

This is a nice book with full color worksheets! It's hard
to see, but it's in a hard cover binder.

 I thought this measuring book might make a nice center activity.....and a count, add, and subtract music CD with 15 songs!

These are by Carson Dellosa and are intended for summer practice, but I'm sure I'll be able to use these in my classroom! Maybe even as an activity for early finishers!

This one, I'm not sure if I'll be able to use it with my students, but looks pretty cool and comes with an interactive Smartboard CD.

So now for some things I found while in cyberspace all day! 

I'm sure everyone's heard about Bloglovin' by now. Well I finally jumped on the wagon today. I saw this button on a couple of blogs last week and just knew I had to have it on my blog!! 

Thanks to google, I found it today! The creator is Melissa over at "Common Core & So Much More" and she is more than happy to share it! You can go to her blog {here} to get it for your blog! But FIRST, click on it to follow me!

My chair is still a work in progress and while looking for ideas today on how to paint polka dots, chevron, and the best way to put my name on my chair, I found a great tutorial for painting chevron from Kelly at "First Grade Fairytales." Hers turned out great! She makes it look so easy, that I'm thinking maybe I can do this!

A polka dot tutorial on "you tube" led me to find this fabulous blog that definitely fits its name....."Show Me Cute." This is not a teaching blog, but if you're looking for cutesy craft ideas, for thank yous, your home, or whatever, you want to be sure to follow this  blog!!

Also found a great....and easy....tutorial on how to make editable powerpoints and lock down clipart from Jessica at "A Turn to Learn." But then again what tutorial can't you find from her??? She is my "go to" when I'm trying to figure out technology!! I thought I knew how to do this by simply using the group feature, but found that some of the images can still be moved, copied, and taken!

With Jessica's tutorial I was able to create these lovely editable teacher binder covers.

If you've been trying to figure this out, or only using the grouping feature, you can see her tutorial {here}. The binder covers are available at both my stores if you like them!

Can you believe they've already been pinned 62 times......WoW!!??

And last.....some giveaways I found today! Who turns down a giveaway, right?

The Bubbly Blonde Teacher

Melonheadz

Kindergarten Works

And the best for last!
Ashley is having multiple giveaways EVERY day
this week!!

I'm telling ya, this girls knows how to throw a celebration!
It's crazy!!!

And don't forget about my upcoming giveaway on July 1st!
Spread the word!
You might even be able to win the Lakeshore interactive Smartboard software!!

Here's a sneak peek at my classroom chair I've been painting on!

I really want to put my name on the white head board, but am not very artful! Does anyone know the easiest way??? Was wondering how printing it and modge podging it on would work! I'm afraid if I free hand it, I'll mess it up!
Any Suggestions?????