writers resources

A Bunch of Resources for Read Across America Day

Posted on by 114 Comments

As writers, we know the importance reading has made in our lives. That is why holidays that support reading for kids are a big deal with me–well, that and the fact I’m also a teacher! In the United States, we celebrate Read Across America Day annually on March 2. This coincides with the birthday of Dr. Seuss, one of the most beloved and iconic children’s writers and perfect for any read-aloud.

Here are great reading websites for youngers:

read across america

  1. Aesop Fables—no ads
  2. Aesop’s Fables
  3. Audio stories
  4. Childhood Stories
  5. Classic Fairy Tales
  6. Fairy Tales and Fables
  7. Scholastic: Listen/read–Free non-fic audio books
  8. Starfall
  9. Storyline: Stories read by actors
  10. Stories to read for youngsters

Here are seventeen online libraries with a wide variety of free/fee books:

  1. Aesop for Children–collection of fableskids reading
  2. Actively Learn–add PDFs of your choice to a library that can be annotated, read, and shared.
  3. Audio Books–apps for books purchased through Audio Books (and free ones)
  4. Bookopolis–focused on student reading
  5. Books that Grow–read a story at many different reading levels
  6. Class Literature
  7. Epic–a reading library for kids, 15,000 books; most digital devices
  8. Free Books–download any of our 23,469 classic books, and read
  9. Great Books Online by Bartleby
  10. IBooks–amazing way to download and read books.
  11. International Library
  12. Internet Archive— Internet Archive offers over 12,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.READING RESOURCES
  13. Kindle–read ebooks, newspapers, magazines, textbooks and PDFs on an easy-to-use interface.
  14. Library for All
  15. Librivox–free public domain audio books
  16. Loyal Books
  17. Many Books–Over 33,000 ebooks that can be browsed by language, author, title. 
  18. Online Books Page
  19. Open Library
  20. OWL Eyes–for the classics
  21. RAZ Kids–wide variety of reading levels, age groups, with teacher dashboards
  22. Reading Rainbow–library of books; free to try
  23. Signed Stories–beautiful stories in sign language
  24. Tumblebooks (fee)–focused on student reading
  25. Unite for books (free) — gorgeous, easy-to-navigate site.

Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Man vs. Nature saga, the Rowe-Delamagente thrillers, and the acclaimed Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is also the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, blog webmaster, an Amazon Vine Voice, and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. Look for her next prehistoric fiction, Natural Selection, Spring 2022

Advertisement

114 thoughts on “A Bunch of Resources for Read Across America Day”

  1. Funny, I’ve been talking to my students about myths and legends, creation stories, fables and fairy tales for the past month. I’m hoping to inspire them to read these amazing genres.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  3. When I lived in the Savannah area, the Rotary club organized “readers” for all the area elementary schools. It was fun. You were committed to buy a book or two for the class you were assigned to, then you went in and read the books (or part of them) to the class for 30 minutes. I haven’t heard of the program here.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  4. FANTASTIC resources. I wish every month had a “Celebrate Reading Day.” We need it to encourage more people of all ages to read. We were with our CA grandson yesterday (he’s 11 1/2 and dyslexic) and he needed to finish his 30 minutes of reading for the day. He ‘listened’ to the book but was also able to follow along with text on his device. This kind of technology helps so many readers. I was impressed. Thanks so much, Jacqui.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. The closest I ever came to teaching young kids was a short stint as an emergency teacher in middle school. Not many schools are divided into three tiers any more, but I found my experience really helpful when I had to intervene and teach the Offspring to read [using syllables]. If we could instil a love of reading in children from the youngest age, we wouldn’t have to worry about them reading at secondary level.
    If I had my druthers, I’d add every comic book ever written to the list. Love first, literature later. 😀

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    • I’m a believer in comics, too, Andrea. I teach a unit it on it to my MS students (well, not anymore) because done right, kids can learn everything they need to about writing and reading from comics. Kymber does some great Sims that are only different from traditional fiction because of the pictures!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  11. This brings hope to the soul with so much richness within these resources for younger members of our society and I imagine older ones will be tempted too! Many thanks for collating and sharing this detailed list, Jacqui! x

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  30. Thanks Jacqui – I’m rather overloaded at the moment … especially as I’ve just decided I needed to know more about the Byzantine area, Russian folklore and Ukraine … mostly short stories … while many linked around food … cheers Hilary

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  38. Excellent list, Jacqui. I love sharing with others the free resources at Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Entering an author’s name (e.g., L. Frank Baum) brings up a list of the free books in a variety of formats (e.g., online HTML, EPUB, MOBI, PDF). For example, the 14 books in the Oz series are available, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with illustrations by W. W. Denslow (images included!).

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  39. I don’t see any real decline in reading compared to 20 yrs ago. I see younger people, mainly women, reading all the time, everywhere. Real books are here to stay, I think, although books will never be as popular as TV, music, movies, gaming, etc

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  40. We have similar literary events here in Oz. Book Week is one that comes to mind (schools get authors to come and talk to the kids, they have book fairs where scholastic come and have books on sale for families to buy etc) and every state has the Premier’s Reading Challenge every year, where kids are challenged to read a certain number of books over so many weeks (the number of books is by age bracket). Anything to get kids reading is awesome!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      • The Reading Challenge is by State/Territory, so they all vary (ours and NSW starts about now) and: “The Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual Book Week returns in 2022 with the theme “Dreaming with eyes open…”. The event will take place between August 20-26″.

        Like

        Reply

  42. Pingback: A Bunch of Resources for Read Across America Day — – uwerolandgross

What do you think? Leave a comment and I'll reply.

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.