Help Your Students Learn to Read with Starfall.com!

The tool I researched is a website called Starfall. This tool can be used by students from Pre-K on up to 3rd or 4th grade to help with their reading skills. It was developed by a gentleman named Stephen Schutz who had problems learning to read as a child and decided, once he got his PhD in Physics and got published, that he wanted to create something that would help children like him (and all others as well) learn to read. He wanted to make it fun and interesting so that all children would become avid readers and learn to enjoy the experience of reading and writing.

One advantage of this program is that it is so user-friendly and entertaining, my son (who is 6) uses it and loves every minute! Another is that the site has Parent and Educator pages with links to helpful hints and other tools that can be beneficial for even the most difficult of cases. There is even a Download Center with printouts, awards, journals - everything you need to make inspired readers and writers out of all your students. One of the best advantages - it is free, so anyone with internet access can use it, even outside of the school setting! Of course, this brings out its major disadvantage - only those with internet access can use it. But, at least it would be available at the school for the students to use... The only other disadvantage that I can see is that students will need a good bit of guidance when using this, only because the smaller ones will keep going back to their favorite story because it's cute or they're used to it instead of moving around to new and more challenging stories. But, with proper guidance, this can be avoided entirely.

To learn more about Starfall, just use the links provided in this post.

In my opinion, this site is a wonderful and useful tool in helping younger students learn to read. As educators, we would want to explore this before introducing it to our students so that we can guide them in proper use of it; my experience with my son is that it can sometimes be treated more like a video game where they keep going back to what they've done before instead of moving on to the next level. With proper guidance, you should be able to get great little readers thanks to this program!