The Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) program “Between the Lions” focuses on helping children recognize letter combinations and phonic pairings to increase reading fluency. The games on the complementary PBS Kids website reflect this focus. For example, in the “Blending Bowl” game, players select a football player representing common beginning word letter pairings--like “bl”--and another football player to represent common ending word letter pairings. They then watch as the two players run toward each other, hearing the sounds combine phonetically until they understand the new word the two pairs create. The site makes use of humor, music and animation to encourage phonetic awareness and sight word recognition.
The ReadWriteThink website was created by a partnership between the International Reading Association, The National Council of Teachers of English and the Verizon Foundation to provide high-quality literacy resources to teachers, parents and students. Interactive games on the site provide practice on a wide variety of reading skills appropriate for students from kindergarten through high school. The games “Construct-a-Word,” “Picture Match,” “What’s in the Bag” and “Word Wizard” specifically employ strategies like phonetic awareness and sight word recognition that help to build reading fluency.
This website provides worksheet resources for teachers and a small group of online games designed to introduce students to phonics. The games range from practicing the sounds of each letter in the alphabet to practicing spelling of three letter words. Although the current selection of games is fairly small, they offer a good way to introduce basic phonetic awareness to early readers and set the stage for building reading fluency as their skills increase.
Roythezebra.com was originally created around an interactive, guided story about Roy the Zebra and his search to find his herd. The site now contains not only the nine-part guided story, but also a set of free interactive reading games designed to practice sight word recognition, phonetic awareness and reading comprehension.