Starfall.com - teaching reading comprehension and phonics

I was first introduced to Starfall.com by my mother-in-law, who specializes in teaching reading and life skills to adult special needs students. Her classes use the site very successfully to assist in learning to read. She first suggested we show it to my son when he was two, and I was surprised to find that he loved exploring the site, and watching the animations. Now just three years old, he regularly chooses exploring Starfall as one of his favorite computer time activities.

As a free resource, Starfall is staggeringly deep. There's an enormous amount of content for children to learn from, but even more surprisingly there's a large supply of freely downloadable content for parents and educators. Starfall does sell supporting printed materials to go along with the site, but seem to offer most of those products for free in the form of PDF downloads.

Starfall was created by Stephen Schutz and his wife Susan Polis Schutz, who co-founded BlueMountain.com, the animated greeting card site that you probably received a ton of cards from in the late 90's. In a story of truly giving back, Stephen Schutz was a student who had difficulties learning to read, and trailed behind his classmates considerably. So it seems his desire to help make learning to read easier for youngsters comes from a very personal place. You can read more about their story on the About page.

Tags: freeware, learning to read, LearningToRead, reading, reading education, ReadingEducation, Starfall, Starfall.com