A Free Online Library for beginning readers!! Sounds too good to be true, right? I thought so too. So I decided to check it out for myself first. And sure enough, it’s the real deal. Naturally my very first thought was… “MUST blog about this!!!”
The library can be found at www.uniteforliteracy.com
It began right in my dear ol’ state of Colorado. This is a quote from their page.
“Unite for Literacy is a Colorado-based social enterprise that employs a sponsorship business model that enables books in our library to remain free to everyone, forever. We unite with partners from the public, private, and civic sectors to create picture book abundance and support families to read with their children.”
I found a little over ONE HUNDRED books targeted at beginning readers. (K-1st)
Every book can be narrated, in multiple languages. After you select a title you can change the narration language by clicking “narration”. I thought this was an particularly awesome feature for our English Language Learners!
I picked this book about bees because I’m just about ready to launch our Insect unit. If you click where it says English with the audio button, this page will be read aloud. This was one of the books with slightly less repetitive text.
They have Fiction and Non- Fiction titles, but I was most impressed by their large selection of Non-Fiction texts. Finding quality Non-Fiction text at an emergent level is no simple task. But the images in these books are stunning!
These are the type of images that even my reluctant readers would find highly engaging. This book about Deserts had much more repetitive text. One sentence per page.
To read more about Unite For Literacy, visit their website: http://about.uniteforliteracy.com/ and from there you can explore their library for yourself. This site was shared with me by another first grade teacher at my district Tech Innovator meeting today, and I was all kinds of excited to share it with you guys!! If you know of any other sites like this one, please comment and let me know so I can add it to my tool belt!
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ FallingIntoFirst
9 Responses
Great site…and I can't believe it's free! I can't wait to explore it more. Thanks for sharing!
-Amanda
Kindergarten Teacher at the Wheel
Looks fantastic! I have just the kiddos in mind for this in my classroom, thanks for sharing.
Tania
Mrs Poultney's Ponderings
Awesome!!! Thank you so much for sharing this information.
Thank You! I am getting on tomorrow! Wendy 1stgradefireworks
This is a fantastic site. I just thought I would let you know that its http://www.uniteforliteracy.com I tried it with the .org and kept getting an error message and then realized after clicking through another link of yours, that it was .com. Thanks for sharing this site. I can't wait to explore it more and use it with my class.
Katie
Thank you for pointing that out!! Fixed it! 🙂
You are fast!!! Thank you so much for sharing, Stephanie!!!!!! How exciting to find a free site such as this!!!
Hugs – Lisa
This is an awesome find! I think I'll show my firsties it during computer lab this week and then let them explore during listen to reading times. Sue
Thanks for sharing! I really like it. How did you get to more books? My page only shows about 20 books. I can't find a way to get more. Where do I click so I can find the 100 or so books you found? I have clicked everything I can find.
Glad to have another resource.