Look and listen to colorful graphics with an audio of English consonants and vowels, common letter combinations, prefixes, suffixes and words at Starfall's website (starfall.com). Letter games show a scene displaying the capital and small versions of a letter, such as a lightning bolt with the sound of lightning in the background and the audio of someone saying "L" and then pronouncing the "L" sound. A picture of another "L" word is then displayed, such as "lips." Other games have celebrities singing letter songs. Play "Zac the Rat," which sings a song about the letter "A" and then plays an animated story using a lot of words with the short "a" sound. For beginning English speakers, there is no better place to start.
Play English reading, vocabulary, literacy, spelling and letter games at PBS Kids' website (pbskids.org). Characters from "Sesame Street," "The Electric Company," Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," as well as other Public Broadcasting System television show favorites, guide players through rhyming songs, spelling bingo, vocabulary lists and virtual spelling bees on this animated site.
FunBrain (funbrain.com) has an English game amusement park online. Help feed virtual gorillas by solving English grammar problems playing "Grammar Gorillas" or type the word for the picture shown in "What's the Word" at FunBrain. You can also play "Plural Girls," which test players' skill at plurals. "The Word Turtle" page allows users to make their own word search puzzles at varying skill levels. The puzzles can be printed or played online. This site has four skill levels for online word search puzzles for words in books such as "Harry Potter," "Tarzan" and "Where the Wild Things Are," making the site an excellent component to book reading.
Play English games featuring the characters and environments in beloved kids' books such as "Goosebumps" and "Charlotte's Web." Pick a character from "Charlotte's Web" (scholastic.com) as the player's avatar, then enter Charlotte's world by playing interactive games such as "Synonym Soup," "Prefix Poker," "Noun Knowledge," "Adjective Alley" and "Verb Voodoo." Scholastic's website has English arcade games, quizzes, puzzles, polls and writing games and also games, stories and comic books you can create yourself. These games are fun and educational, but are even more interesting when used in tandem with the books that inspired them.