Reading Websites

Reading during the early years helps the child in improving his/her language skills. Reading also helps a person be successful in life. It helps a person acquire a lot of information. Reading can also alleviate boredom or even shape a person's life.


Fortunately for us mothers, there are a lot of reading websites that would help us prepare our kids for reading or improve their reading skills.

Starfall.com is a website that teach preschool, kindergarten, and first grade children to read with phonics. This website offers exciting phonics games and online interactive books. It includes songs and a lot of animations for each letter of the alphabet, animated interactive books and other reading exercises. There are also a lot of downloadable materials such as handouts for classroom use from theStarfall.com's Download Center. Although Starfall.com has a free version parents can opt to subscribe for up to three computer at home and teachers can subscribe for their class.

Storyline Online provides interactive  stories read by Screen Actors Guild. Each book includes activities and lesson ideas. 

Kol Jr. Stories has a collection of online story books that are read aloud.

Clifford Interactive Storybooks offers interactive stories and games for early readers. Students has to click on the right word to complete a sentence on every page. 

In PBS KIDS GAMES children can choose reading games, letter games, spelling games, literacy games or vocabulary games among others to develop their reading skills.

Interactive Food Planner

As if obesity causing health problems like diabetes, heart disease, hyperlipidemia is not enough.  ABC news recently had an article about the link between obesity, sleep apnea and cognitive problems in children which reported that according to Researchers at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital and Pritzker School of Medicine "Cognitive functioning in children is adversely affected by frequent health-related problems, such as obesity and sleep-disordered breathing. Furthermore, poorer integrative mental processing may place a child at a bigger risk for adverse health outcomes."  Not only that, UMHS claimed that obesity causes psychological problems, like poor self-esteem and depression too. Thus, it is imperative for parents to be vigilant so as to have healthy kids considering that there are higher chances of obesity if a child has improper eating habits.

Since diet has an important role in having  healthy children it is kind of reassuring to know that there are interactive tools offered by the government for cautious Moms. In USDA's MyPlate, you can find MyFoodapedia, Daily Food Plan, Food Planner, Food Tracker and Child Cost Calculator.  With MyFoodapedia  concerned parents can have quick access to food information such as food groups and calorie count once the food name is entered in the box. Daily Food Plan is useful if a cautious parent want to know the daily amount of each food group needed. All it takes is entering information such as age, sex, height, weight and physical activity to receive a customized Daily Food Plan.  Like in the Daily Food Plan, Food Planner also necessitates entering some basic information to be able to use the MyPyramid Menu Planner.  After searching for food, a list of the closest matches will appear.  Once  the item is selected from the list a Mom can customize it. She can select the amount she wants to eat and assign it to a mealtime.  After she add this to her menu it will tell how this food and other foods she selected contributed to her daily goal or daily limit. It will also gives her daily menu report, weekly menu report as well as family menu report. Like wise  Food Tracker or MyPyramid Tracker gives parents a fully accessible version of a dietary assessment and planning tool. With  Child Cost Calculator parents can estimate how much it will annually cost to raise a child.