Our Collection of the Best Phonics Resources

Parents know how important it is to supplement their kids’ reading at home. But aside from picking up a good old-fashioned paperback, what other tools are out there? How do you distinguish great resources from mediocre? We’ve got your back. Here’s a guide to our favorite phonics and reading resources.

Digital Resources

Freckle ends up on just about all of our lists. That’s because it’s fun, effective, and takes literally no brain power from you to get your child set up on it. With activities in reading, phonics, and math, it’s a great one-stop shop for summer practice.

Wordwall houses an incredible library of teacher-made games in just about any subject you can think of. You can create your own for a fee, but accessing their library of pre-made games is completely free. You can browse generally or search for a specific skill. Kids love their fast-paced game templates, which are especially great for any student who likes a little competition.

Teach Your Monster to Read is visually appealing and so much fun for kids! They get to design their own monster and bring it with them every step of their reading journey.

Homer is a super fun and engaging website and app for kids to practice reading, writing, and a slew of other crucial early literacy skills.

Epic is a digital library with thousands of books for all ages, from decodables to young adult novels. They have texts on just about every subject in both fiction and nonfiction. Kids love Epic books because they look like real books, only they’re digital. The pages turn when you click on them, and most books are accompanied by vivid illustrations, photos, and/or graphics.

Hard Print Resources

For those of you wanting to limit or eliminate summer screen time, we recommend the following resources:

Highlights Kids is one of the most popular magazine subscriptions for kids, and for a good reason. Each issue contains many opportunities for readers to learn, explore, and play. While most of the content doesn’t feel academic, students practice crucial skills in reading, math, critical thinking, problem-solving, and strategizing.

Phonics books are a great resource for students who are emerging readers. Also called “decodable” books, they usually come in a set and are specifically written with targeted phonics skills and concepts for students to practice systematically and sequentially. The main difference between these books and other books that have phonics concepts is that these usually align to a specific curriculum, which means that the skills students use when reading each subsequent book are scaffolded and follow the same progression as the lessons they are learning/have learned in school (or at home).

Finally, a high-quality phonics workbook is another great no-tech bet. But not all workbooks are created equal. Those that focus primarily or exclusively on rote, repetitive copying, and other memorization strategies don’t necessarily provide kids with meaningful learning. It’s important for workbooks to be substantive, especially since it’s easy for worksheets to become busywork! That means they should require critical thinking and application as opposed to mindless practice. This one by Scholastic has some great exercises.

Survival Strategies for Quarantine Day 1

Given the unprecedented disruption to schools in these strange times, families face a new challenge – how do you keep kids happy and engaged when they are stuck inside all day?! Given our expertise in all things education and learning, we've created this daily newsletter to offer quick tips and share resources for you to prevent learning loss, encourage productive distractions from the crisis, and help your child continue to develop and grow while stuck at home.

We know this won't be easy, but we are here to help!

With that in mind, we will also be updating the site daily with a wide range of creative, educational, online workshops for students of all ages.  From a free daily Story Time at 9:00am and 4:00pm, to writing, acting, math classes, and so much more, we are tapping into the vast pool of diverse talents at Smarten Up to create workshops that will keep students engaged with and excited about learning.   

Newsela is a news aggregator that curates high interest articles for students - this means that its staff gathers articles from news sources across the web, and then adjusts the reading level to make them accessible to students of all ages. While articles are organized by topic, there are also wonderful Text Sets that enable children to explore a specific area of interest with guidance. Plus, kids can annotate as they read and work through related comprehension activities as well. Newsela makes current events accessible to children, no matter their age or reading level, which should lead to some interesting dinner conversations for all!

Cultivating Confident Readers

A common hurdle for parents and teachers alike is convincing kids to read. While there is the eternal challenge of finding an amazing book to get lost in (not to mention learning to get lost in a book!), video games and social media present intense competition for kids’ limited attention. Plus, it isn’t enough to just pick up a book and read the words in it! Today’s classrooms demand that students engage with text in more ways than ever, and that starts with strong comprehension. 

There are a number of tools and strategies that can help improve a child’s ability to comprehend text, but first, it’s important to make sure they actually enjoy reading. For a child who despises reading, whether that’s because it’s “too hard” or “boring”, there is hope! It just takes a little legwork. Help them find a book that sparks joy. It might take some digging, but there IS a book out there that will get him or her to fall in love with reading (or at least with that particular book...but we have to start somewhere.) Help your child discover what that genre is that they just won’t be able to put down, and find as much of it as you can. It might be graphic novels, cookbooks, magazines, instructional manuals...if it has text, let them read as much as they want! Then help them develop their comprehension skills with the tools and strategies below.

Supporting Young Readers

In the early grades (Kindergarten through around Fourth Grade), students need a balance of instruction in phonics, fluency, and comprehension. While these skills can be isolated in lessons or through homework activities, it is crucial for students to engage in multi-faceted reading instruction during these formative years. This starts at school, but there are many ways to supplement instruction through fun activities at home. 

• To help students who find decoding to be an obstacle, Scholastic has some creative ideas for making your own phonics games to reinforce this skill, and Homer is an amazing app to support early phonics learning. 

• To practice fluency, many kids love Reader’s Theater scripts, which are an excellent way to help your child bring characters to life by practicing vocal expression and changing intonation, an important part of fluency development. 

• If your child struggles with self-monitoring while reading--making many errors and not catching them--, see if they would be open to recording themselves while they read, so that they can hear how they sound as a reader. Most students love hearing their voices on tape (but some don’t)!

If your child struggles with understanding what he or she reads, here are 7 essential skills for building comprehension:

1. Previewing text - Skim pictures, look for keywords, think about what the book will be about based on the title/blurb on the back.

2. Asking questions - Ask who, what, when, where, and especially why and how questions before, during, and after reading

3. Making predictions - Use clues from the text to guess what will happen next

4. Making inferences - Use clues from the text to draw a logical conclusion about what is happening that is not stated in the text

5. Making connections - Relate the text to yourself (text-to-self connection), another book (text-to-text connection), or the world (text-to-world connection)

6. Summarizing the text - Put the important events and details into your own words

7. Evaluating the text - Look closely at how the author wrote the book, think about what you learned from this book, and what you will do with what you learned 

To make the most of their time reading, kids should be active readers. This means being engaged in the text, having a pencil in hand, asking and answering questions, re-reading for deeper meaning, and above all, reading books they love! To learn more about supporting early readers, check out our post on talking to kids about books and reading to learn.

Building Reading Skills in Secondary Grades

By Middle School, most students have mastered the skill of decoding, and can now focus all of their reading energy on building fluency and getting better at deciphering what the text means instead of what it says. For the former, the most important thing for kids to do is read, and read a lot! From books and comics to recipes and social media posts, the more kids practice their reading, the more fluency and vocabulary they’ll build. As for building their comprehension skills, active engagement with the text is key and purposeful annotations are the best tool for their reading toolbox! 

Students in upper grades should always have a pencil in hand for underlining, highlighting, and note-taking while they read. Here are our suggestions for how to use these tools most effectively.

• If a child struggles with figuring out what to highlight, it can help to use different colors to highlight for different foci such as important figures, themes, dates, and events.

• Students can write down questions, predictions, or connections to prior knowledge in the margins or in a graphic organizer. 

• They can write down connections between what they are reading and what they already knew about the topic. 

• Students can also look for things like text structure, which can help them determine what information is most important and what is more peripheral. 

• In order to navigate the new vocabulary they may come across, especially in content-specific texts, students should practice using context clues to try to determine the meaning of unknown words, then check their definition using a dictionary. 

• It can also help students to vocalize while they are reading; hearing their own voice speak the information out loud can help their brains more fully process that information. 

Ultimately, mastery of a text boils down to engagement; the more actively a reader engages with a text, the more he or she will get out of that reading. While so many kids see annotation as an annoying or distracting extra step in an already complicated process, it is important to explain that this extra step will become easier and more natural with practice, and will lead to immeasurable gains in learning. Not only will they gain a better understanding of what they read, they will also be able to more effectively and efficiently navigate that text to find the information they need to write their essay or build their study guide. Learn more about annotation strategies through our post on next level annotations!

Reading for all Ages

LETTER FROM MARA

Reading is such a fundamental part of our everyday existence, we often take for granted what a complicated task it can be. We read emails and work communications to do our jobs; we read the news and articles of interest to stay abreast of what is happening in the world; we read directions and agreements to make decisions; many of us read academic texts for work; and when we have time, we read for pleasure. Each of these tasks requires us to read differently, but because of practice and experience, our brains understand how to adapt the way we read to get the most out of the task at hand - for example, looking for important details and taking notes when reading for work, versus skimming the news or getting lost in the story of a book without worrying about remembering every detail. These are subconscious choices we make as experienced readers that come to us as second nature, which is why it can be so hard to understand why kids have difficulty with reading comprehension.

For children, mid-to-late elementary school marks the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. At this stage, we expect students to be fluent decoders capable of investing their mental energy into making meaning of what they read. We want kids to learn to make connections to the text based on their knowledge of the world, their personal experiences, and other books or articles they’ve read. While this is the expectation, though, it is important that we help students along as they learn to think more deeply as readers. With that in mind, Talking to Kids About Books includes a great list of questions you can use to guide more meaningful conversations with your child about what they are reading, and Reading to Learn offers a list of helpful strategies to support comprehension.

For more advanced students, 7th and 8th grade is when kids must learn how to analyze a text. Knowledge of reading must go hand-in-hand with ideas about how an author used subject, form, and diction in order to create a more compelling story. Learning to read closely in this way can require a lot of guidance and practice, and that is why it is so important that students understand how to go about this process strategically. A 7th grader isn’t likely to pick up on themes of isolation or male companionship when reading Of Mice and Men, just as so many high schoolers (and, at times, adults!) struggle with Shakespeare.However, understanding how to utilize online resources to preview themes, or watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet before unpacking the text, can make a world of difference by assisting students to read and annotate with purpose. Next Level Annotation provides useful ideas for helping kids develop these more advanced reading skills.

Next Level Annotations

As students grow older, the demands of their classwork evolve; rather than merely summarizing plot or retaining historical dates, students are challenged to think critically, as they take their base of skills and knowledge and use these tools to forge original analysis. In parallel with this evolution in their education must come an evolution in the way they read, and in the way they annotate. With luck, students will have been building up simple annotation habits for some time by this point — but now, the purpose of annotation shifts, from a tactic for staying engaged with the reading, to an active commentary that records insight and evidence with a grander end goal in mind: the analytical essay.

When students read with the aim of collecting evidence to use in an essay, they do so under a variety of different circumstances. Some teachers might provide a framework or prompt before reading begins — others will wait until after the class has finished reading a text before distributing the essay assignment. In either case the goal of annotation is the same: to activate the mind as students read, and start them down the path of critical analysis. The key here is reading with a clear purpose. If the prompts are distributed ahead of time, students should come up with a key — by numbering them for example — and mark the text with the appropriate number whenever they find a quote that could be of use in responding to that prompt. For visually-oriented learners, pens or post-it notes in different colors for different themes can enhance the process. Even if they don’t have the list of possible prompts before they begin reading, students should use a site like LitCharts to preview the text, searching for important themes that they can annotate in a similar way, as these are likely to be helpful for the eventual essay. It’s best to focus on two or three themes at a time — and remember that one piece of evidence might be helpful for more than one theme, and should be marked with more than one number or color. 

If they’re writing a research paper, and using sources that they find independently, many students will find that the challenge is sifting through the text to find relevant evidence. Here, too, there is a shift in the approach to reading; rather than starting from the beginning and reading a stack of library books through the end, students should begin with a focused question and use strategic searches to isolate the evidence they need. This means using the table of contents, learning to navigate an index, focusing on headings, and searching intelligently through online databases. As students encounter the information they will need, they should be compiling quotes into a central location, making sure to include source information and page numbers as they read and record to smooth the process of creating a bibliography later on. Online tools such as easybib.com, citationmachine.net, and the reference materials at Purdue’s Online Writing Lab make creating citations easier than ever, but most students will need an introduction to the process — both in order to understand the required formatting and its intention, and to avoid unintentional plagiarism. 

The right kind of annotation will make the process of writing a critical essay or research paper ten times simpler, and much more effective at the same time. Not only can annotation provide the kind of record that students can easily transfer into a brainstorm and outline, it will activate their way of thinking about the text as they read, setting them up for success as writers.

Smarter Summers: Elementary

For so many kids, the end of the school year is synonymous with a total break from learning. Sure, they may (and should!) read books over the summer vacation, but math is out of the picture, writing is forgotten, and spelling is given little to no consideration. However, this lack of engagement can have a serious impact on growing minds. Studies show that students on average lose 2.6 months of math skills and two months of reading gains when they check out over summer break. With this in mind, here are some tips for keeping your little one engaged.

Be a book worm!

- Take lots of trips to local libraries or book stores so your child can continue to consistently explore new books, just like they do in their classroom and school library.

- Read with your children! Chances are they are interested in books that are a bit too complex or challenging for them to read on their own, but with your help, these stories become accessible. Plus, these higher level books will include great vocabulary words for your child to learn.

- Have your child keep a journal of her summer adventures. Not only will serve as a great way to continue writing, it is also a really nice way to encourage creative story telling through a combination of words, pictures, drawings, mementos, and more. Plus, they'll have an incredible book of their own creation to look back on to remember their super fun summer break!

Don't forget about STEM!

- Building math fact fluency is central to later mathematical success, and luckily there are tons of great apps to help kids master their facts. Some of our favorites include Operation Math, Sushi Monster, Number Run, and Marble Math. 

- Legos and puzzles are a great way to develop visual thinking and problem solving skills. Let students work on their own creations, or give them a challenge to solve.

Learn with Smarten Up!

We will also be offering a two-week elementary academic workshop for rising 1st and 2nd graders this summer. We want our students to return to the classroom with confidence, feeling excited to show off all that they’ve learned, and eager to learn even more! Our carefully planned half-day program is designed not only to prevent learning loss, but to actually keep kids moving forward with the important skills that will help them excel in school. We target foundational reading, writing, and math skills using research-based programs within the context of a fun, game-based learning experience.

For more information visit the Smarter Summers section of the website, or email mara@smarten-up.com.

Learning to Learn

Our primary goal at Smarten Up is to help students become learners. We want them to learn how to read and do math, to learn about the history of our world and the science behind it, and to learn about themselves. To do this, we empower them with a robust set of tools and strategies that they can use to tackle the wide range of challenges they are likely to face in their academic careers and beyond. The key to making this happen is teaching students the difference between “knowing” and “understanding.”

Tests, quizzes, writing assignments, and classroom discussions are tools that teachers use to evaluate how effectively students have learned the material. As we know, assessments range from multiple choice and short answer questions to word problems and essays. The former evaluate a student’s rote knowledge—how well she can recall a definition or perform arithmetic; the latter gauge children’s ability to use information in order to answer a question or solve a problem. 

Genuine learning occurs when students can build their understanding of a given concept from the ground up, from knowledge through evaluation. It is the difference between cramming for an assessment by memorizing a collection of vocabulary terms, and learning those words in context, with the support of graphic organizers, outlines, mnemonic devices, and other memory aids. While the latter may take more time and effort before the test, that energy will pay off when it’s time to study for a midterm or final exam. Even if a child doesn’t remember everything, she will have an efficient set of familiar, useful resources to fill in the gaps. By taking the time to learn and understand the information the first time around, students can avoid the chaos and anxiety that comes with last-minute scrambles or disorganized efforts (or both).

This is where it becomes most important for us to teach our students about themselves as learners. We need students to understand the difference between working smart and working hard (or not so hard in some cases).  They’ve been told to create outlines before they begin writing an essay, though they often don’t do it. Teachers ask them to annotate as they read, but their books often show either pristinely clean pages or ones that are so filled with highlighted text and underlined sections that they are impossible to navigate. They have to study for a test or quiz, and often they simply reread the relevant information and declare themselves “prepared.” They are told to create a plan of attack for short-term and long-term assignments, and they simply open up their portal to look at what is due the next day. 

A large part of this disconnect is due to a lack of understanding. Students know what they should do, but they don’t always understand why or how to make those extra steps meaningful. The goal of Smarten Up’s March blog posts will be to share our favorite tips, tricks, and strategies for helping students learn how to become learners. 

Learning to Read

As children learn to read, the world around them takes on a whole new dimension; signs become meaningful, directions become more clear, and stories and books offer an entirely new world of fantasy, adventure, and discovery. While your child will certainly receive great instruction in school, there are tons of fun and simple ways to reinforce those lessons at home and on the go. Below you will find an overview of how great reading skills develop, and our favorite tools for supporting literacy growth.

The first building block of reading is phonemic awareness, which is a child's ability to hear and identify the sounds in spoken words.  This is a skill that can easily be developed on-the-go as you shuffle your child around the city by challenging her to think of rhyming words, or by playing I Spy with beginning or ending sounds (I spy with my little eye something that begins with a /d/ sound). 

Once your child is able to hear these individual phonemes (which is just a fancy word for sounds), she can begin to learn learn the letters that go with each one. This predictable sound-symbol association is called phonics. While this word is often synonymous with dull and repetitive exercises, it doesn't have to be. With hands-on games such as Alphabet Go Fish and Alphabet Bingo, you can spend quality time with your child and help her learn letter names and sounds. Digital resources also offer the opportunity for engaging independent practice, and the best of them allow you to monitor your child's progress as well. Some of our favorite phonics apps include Learn with Homer, Phonics Island, and Letter School, which also targets handwriting skills.

After these foundations have been laid, it will be time for your child to work on developing her fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. The first is a question of practice makes perfect. The more your child reads, the better she will be able to quickly identify words; and the more your child hears a fluent reader model how to read with expression (pausing at punctuation, showing excitement at exclamation marks, etc.) the better she will learn to do this herself. The last two building blocks of literacy will develop as a result of talking with your child about books. It is important to not only ask about who, where and what is involved in a chapter or story, but to also think about bigger picture concepts and connections that can be made. What motivates a character? What are some of the problems or challenges she faced? How did she overcome them? How was the book similar or different to your child's real-life experiences? 

Most importantly, though, reading should be fun. The more you, as a parent, are able to express and share excitement and enthusiasm for stories and books, the more likely your child is to embrace the exciting possibilities of written language!