Give kids vocab practice with customizable word lists. Students can play games online, while teachers can get lessons and printables to support the learning. (One-time purchase; Grades K–5)
40+ Best Reading Websites for Home and Classroom Learning
Fluent reading may be the most important skill anyone can master. Just a few minutes a day helps build the reading fluency that provides lifelong benefits. Reading websites for kids are one way to support their reading journey.
How can reading websites help kids, parents, and teachers?
While reading books together is always an important activity, emergent readers also need other types of practice. They benefit from activities that focus more specifically on phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and other key parts of reading fluency. To learn more about these elements, explore the science of reading here.
Many reading websites offer games, exercises, and other activities that give kids a chance to develop these important reading skills. Studies show it only takes 15 minutes of practice each day to build reading fluency. When kids play interactive reading games online, or complete short lessons with follow-up activities, they get those 15 important minutes in an easy, effective way.
How To Use Reading Websites
Teachers can use reading websites as part of their lesson plans or as individual classroom activities. They can be a fun option for fast finishers or a good way to provide extra support for kids who need more practice on a certain skill. Many of the reading websites on our list provide free access for teachers who use the site in their classroom, making them a valuable resource for your toolkit.
At home, parents and families will also find a lot of value in reading websites. To make the most of them, it can be helpful to understand your child’s current reading level first. Ask your child’s teacher to share this information, and then learn more about how reading levels work here. It’s also a good idea to ask your child’s teacher if there are any areas they could use extra help with, and then look for games or activities to support those skills.
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The goal of most reading websites is to make reading fun and exciting for students. Take advantage of that to make screen time more meaningful. Look for sites that your student actively enjoys using, and you’ll find those 15 minutes of daily reading practice just fly by!
There are options for all ages, helping students learn to read, discover new books, track and share progress, and more. There’s a big selection of free options, but there are some excellent paid sites that schools and parents may want to check out too.
- Best Free Reading Websites for Kids
- Best Paid Reading Websites for Kids
Free or Low-Cost Books
First Book
First Book is a non-profit that provides new books and educational resources to schools and programs serving children in need, from birth to age 18. The benefits of registering with First Book include free books from the First Book National Book Bank, low-cost books and resources from the First Book Marketplace at 50-90 percent off retail price, and potential funding from First Book’s corporate partners and generous donors.
WNDB in the Classroom
To help children find stories and authors that they can relate to, We Need Diverse Books’ Educators Making a Difference Grants are for educators who believe in the importance of incorporating diverse books by diverse authors into their schools, libraries, and educational organizations. Grants provide up to $2,000 per educator and can be used toward buying diverse titles, hosting diversity-focused student or community events, diversity audits of existing collections, or any other project that supports diverse literature.
Better World Books
Better World Books receives books from libraries, booksellers, book drives, and through community Drop Boxes, and then sells what they can to raise money for literacy, donate books in good condition, and recycle the balance. Make a request to become a donation recipient.
Literacy Empowerment Foundation
Literacy Empowerment Foundation’s Reading Resource Project offers free books to recipients who can pay shipping, handling, and administrative costs. Reading Resource Project books come in sets of 100 books per set and any literacy-based effort qualifies for these books. You do not have to be a school or teacher to qualify.
Little Free Library
Little Free Library is a place to find a book or bring a book to share! Find Little Free Libraries in neighborhoods all over the world, all with different offerings. Anyone may take a book or bring a book to share. Through its Impact Library Program, Little Free Library provides no-cost Little Free Library book exchanges to communities where books are scarce.
Multicultural Children’s Book Day
Multicultural Children’s Book Day provides teachers with free, diverse, inclusive, and multicultural books for their classroom libraries.
Free Books to Read Online
Vooks
Vooks is an entire library of storybooks brought to life through animation, read-aloud narration, engaging music and sound, and read-along text. Vooks is always free for teachers’ classroom use on one device.
Epic!
This digital reading platform for kids 12 and under with more than 40,000 high-quality and award-winning fiction and nonfiction books, audio books, and videos from 250 publishers. Epic! is completely free for teachers and librarians.
International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL)
The non-profit International Children’s Digital Library identifies exemplary books that help children to understand the world around them and the global society in which they live and makes them freely available on the Internet.
Free Audiobooks and Video Read Alouds
KidLit TV
Children can experience authors and illustrators reading their works through KidLit TV’s Read Out Loud program, which includes an array of titles featuring diverse people and cultures. Find more read-alouds, plus podcasts, activity ideas, book trailers, and more at their award-winning website.
Story Time from Space
Story Time from Space is a project of the Global Space Education Foundation, which sends children’s books to the International Space Station. While in space, astronauts record themselves on video reading these books to the children of Earth and share them on the Story Time from Space website.
Storyline Online
At Storyline Online, SAG-AFTRA Foundation records well-known actors reading children’s books and makes graphically dynamic videos so that children around the world can enjoy favorite stories, such as The Kissing Hand, A Bad Case of Stripes, and Stellaluna.
Julie’s Library
Join Julie Andrews for story time at Julie’s Library! Julie and her daughter, children’s author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children’s books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too.
Lee & Low Storytime
Publisher Lee & Low Books’ Lee & Low Storytime has a growing library of author read alouds which include several titles read in Spanish.
PBS KIDS Read-Alongs
PBS KIDS Read-Alongs offers families a place to come together and read along with favorite titles read by celebrities, including Michelle Obama, and PBS KIDS authors.
PBS Books Storytime
PBS Books Storytime is a resource developed by the PBS Books channel to offer author read-aloud stories and book features for educators, libraries and families. The segments feature children’s book authors and others in “Read-Aloud” segments and/or video features on new and best-loved children’s books.
Goodnight with Dolly
Goodnight With Dolly features Dolly Parton reading aloud titles from the Imagination Library. Snuggled in bed with her Imagination Library book, Dolly shares stories that are just right for this moment in time.
Read, Wonder, and Learn!
Author Kate Messner’s Read, Wonder, and Learn! is a complilation of resources from favorite authors and illustrators that include everything from first-chapter and picture book video read-alouds to drawing and writing mini-lessons.
Lit2Go
Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 format.
Reading to Learn
Third grade reading proficiency is the benchmark where children transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” and a key indicator for a child’s future educational success and workforce readiness. Research shows that two to three months of reading proficiency is lost for students who do not read over the summer, and recent data shows a decline in third grade reading proficiency due to increased time spent out of the classroom during COVID-19 school closures. Research shows placing books and resources directly into the homes of families helps combat learning loss. Through this program, we hope to increase third grade reading proficiency in Tennessee by providing students with resources outside of school.
Chapter 1: Summer Reading Pilot Begins
The K–3 Home Library program began as a summer reading pilot in 2020, providing more than 30,000 rising first through third grade students in 36 school districts with books and resources delivered to their homes over the summer, at no cost to families or districts. In partnership with Scholastic and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, participating students received a Scholastic Summer Learning Pack or six books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library’s pilot Summer Collection.
Participating school districts were chosen based on the county’s designation of “distressed” or “at-risk” by the Tennessee Department of Economic & Community Development and the Tennessee Department of Education. Through this pilot, families also received free access to digital learning resources and activities to engage with their children around the monthly books.
Chapter 2: Connecting Schools and Homes During the School Year
During the 2020-2021 academic school year, the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) turned to GELF to implement a K–3 Home Library program for 79 targeted school districts across the state that mirrored our summer reading pilot. In partnership with Scholastic and TDOE, this program will support 58,000+ K–3 students and teachers statewide with books, learning resources and family engagement guides to support student learning in the classroom and in the home.
TDOE saw this as an effective response to the learning challenges presented by COVID-19, providing some of the most at-risk students and families with resources they may not be able to obtain due to a lack of broadband access, an inability to attend school in-person or the closure of community resource hubs, such as libraries.
