A Guide to Online Story Resources for Children - Read-Aloud, Audio Stories and more!
Photo by Sound On from Pexels
A Guide to Online Story Resources for Children - Read-Aloud, Audio Stories and more!
A guide to an unlimited resource of read-aloud stories and good audio stories that you can playback for your children before they drift off to sleep.
People would stand in line for days and pay hundreds of dollars
if there were a pill that could do everything for a child that reading aloud does.
It expands their interest in books, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, and attention span.
Simply put, it’s a free oral vaccine for literacy.
Jim Trelease
For children, stories are the window to the outside world. They make children dream of great adventures! Reading aloud stories is a regular part of many childhood experiences. Nothing beats the comfort of being tucked into bed at night while parents read a story from favorite books. These stories fill heads with imagination, hearts with comfort, and souls with a desire to see and experience more.
A good imagination blooms with reading books or listening to stories. In this digital age, we should maximize the internet and the tools it provides to encourage a child’s skills. Reading aloud stories or audio stories to them could be that first spark.
We have put together this guide to websites that offer online stories or read-aloud across a range of ages, abilities, and languages. Try them with your children. They are loads of fun!! And you have a never ending resource of read-aloud stories and good audio stories that you can playback for your children anytime.
Pratham StoryWeaver
StoryWeaver from Pratham Books is designed to provide children with reading resources. It is a digital gateway to thousands of richly illustrated, open-licensed children's stories in mother tongue languages. It is also a first-of-its-kind platform that provides easy-to-use tools to create, adapt, and translate new stories for children. It's the ideal place for parents, educators, writers, translators, and illustrators to come together to weave new stories for children and help to create a pathway to nurture the next generation of readers!
StorylineOnline
This website, a project of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, features actors reading children’s books aloud. There is a huge selection of stories to choose from, and the site is easy for even kindergarteners to navigate. The videos facilitate between the actors reading the book in a storytime setting to close-ups of the illustrations. Storyline Online is an award-winning children’s story site.
Storyberries
Storyberries offers a free, easily accessible online collection of quality stories, comics, fairy tales and poems for children. They are available in an easy to read format with vibrant illustrations designed to excite children and engage them in reading. The stories are organized by themes and they also offer discussion guides for parents.
Storynory
Storynory could be your download source as it has a huge bank of free audio stories and poems for children. Choose from fairytales, classics, Bible stories, educational stories, and also quite a few original ones.
OpenLibrary
Open Library offers classic literature for free. It has a huge collection of 22,000+ books and is a historical treat to turn the pages and read them too because many of the scanned copies are from the original editions.
International Children’s Digital Library
The online children’s library has a single purpose mission of providing free access to children’s literature from around the world. The site is well organized and you can explore the free children’s books stocked here by country, doing a simple search, or by using the many other story browsing methods listed. The site supports quite a few international languages too. The Award-Winning Books section has some of the best online stories for kids. You can register for free to save favorite books, set your preferred language, and also bookmark pages of books you plan to come back to.
Read.gov
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library. It has a huge digital collection and page-turning technology so you can pick from a huge swathe of classic children’s literature. The site encourages readers of all ages to discover the wonderful world of books.
FreeChildrensStories.com
Freechildrenstories.com offers traditional, meaningful storytelling to every child, parent, or teacher around the globe with access to the internet, for free.
OxfordOwl
Oxford University Press created this site to support children’s learning through books and stories. It is also meant for parents who want a one-stop resource for children’s books and other reading activities.The Library has more than 150 e-books to support your child’s reading plus free teaching resources, including storytelling videos, eBooks and downloadable worksheets and teaching notes.
This is Heading
Mrs. P’s Magic Library
Kathy Kinney stars as the grandmotherly Mrs. P, who sits on her couch and reads a classic children’s book aloud. Ideal for age groups of 3+ to 6+, there are also a few stories for 9 and 11-year-olds. You can check out the video selections and use the dropdown filters to select the ones you want to watch. Every story also offers read-along options so children can see the words.
Stories For Kids
Stories for Kids is a website dedicated to providing free and available stories for children, young adults, and teenagers. The stories found on this site are all free from copyright or in the public domain for the enjoyment of kids of all ages.
Starfall: I’m Reading!
Starfall is an extremely popular website for early phonics development. The “I’m Reading!” library section of this site is full of books, plays, and comics. They have a wide variety of books, and also offer the ability to get help with a word here and there, or click to hear the entire thing read.
The Professor Garfield Toon Book Reader
Graphic beginning readers are very important for people developing their reading skills. This site itself is full of resources for parents and educators, as well as a section for kids.
Pratilipi.com
Pratilipi is India's largest digital platform connecting readers and writers. They offer stories in 12 Indian languages!
ReadPrint.com
This site has books of all genres and there is a considerable collection of free children’s books too. It allows book to be read online in a clean clutter-free interface and does not need a registration.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit.
Global Digital Library
This site provides access to free, high-quality, early grade reading resources in languages that children use and understand.
Magic Keys - Children's Storybooks Online
This site has original stories with color illustrations for young children as well as older children and young adults. They combine education and entertainment to amuse and engage children's imaginations. There are riddles, mazes, coloring book pages and a page with children's links that have won Children's Storybooks Online Award for excellence.
AmericanLiterature.com
This site has a wide collection of stories organized into various categories like Short Stories, Mystery, Science Fiction and more!
Stories to Grow By
This site has a collection of Free Children's Storybooks Online can be read aloud or with Audio Narration. The collection consists of Children's Stories: Folktales from all over the world. You will find funny, heart-warming, inspirational and interesting short stories with morals for little kids, which are perfect for teaching such themes as Kindness, Courage, Friendship, and Gratitude.
Kickstart a Reading Habit in Your Kids Today
There are many ways to promote reading books and listening to stories, but these sites can add value to "real reading". E-books, audiobooks, and comics are all beneficial in the reading journey. We strongly recommend that you view the sites before introducing them to your children to make sure the content is age or grade-appropriate. Do you use any websites to share stories or read-aloud with your children? Do share with us in the comments.
Last modified on Wednesday, 03 February 2021 11:41
Leave a comment
Make sure you enter all the required information, indicated by an asterisk (*). HTML code is not allowed.
