GameGoo: Educational Games
www.earobics.com/gamegoo/gooey.html
Earobics is a K-3 “reading intervention’’ product from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. GameGoo is the free, online educational practice game component. For a list of educational standards addressed in each game (such as identifying the letters in words), follow the Home button to the Teachers & Parents link. The games are arranged on the menu from advanced (the pink row) to beginner (the blue row.) Unfortunately, a few of the beginner games didn’t load for me, and that’s why I didn’t award GameGoo the five-star rating they would otherwise deserve.
Sadlier-Oxford: Phonics Student Online Components
www.sadlier-oxford.com/phonics/student.cfm
These phonics games from Sadlier-Oxford are organized by grade level for students from pre-kindergarten to sixth grade. To play the games, you’ll need to turn off your pop-up blocker for the site, because each game pops open a new browser window. Concepts reinforced in the games include short and long vowels, consonant blends, suffixes, dipthongs, contractions, and homonyms. For teachers and home-schoolers, there are professional development videos on how and why to teach phonics, discussed by literacy professionals in a round-table format.
SoftSchools.com: Phonics
www.softschools.com/language_arts/phonics
Although lacking a pretty interface, SoftSchools has a nice collection of interactive phonics flashcards and phonics worksheet generators. The flashcards come in two flavors: uppercase and lowercase. On the first side of the virtual card is a three-letter word; click “flip’’ to see a picture of the object. The worksheet maker produces printable activity sheets for short vowels, long vowels, matching words, beginning sounds, and ending sounds.
