A few days ago I asked for help from readers in identifying sources of free and accessible books that could be downloaded and printed.
I had shared that I’m a big fan of Reading A-Z and the hundreds of fiction and non-fiction small books that they have for teachers to download and print-out. My students love them. I also wrote, though, that it costs about a hundred dollars per year to get them, and that I know that there are a lot of teachers around the world who would find that price to be a burden.
So here’s a very short “The Best…” list sharing The Best Sources For Free & Accessible Printable Books:
I first want to mention that Reading A-Z has about thirty books that are free to download and print. I’d certainly recommend starting with them.
The DLTK Website has a good printable book for every letter in the alphabet. They also have a number of books with a religious perspective, but that does not seem to be present in their alphabet books. Thanks to Roselink for pointing out this site.
Linda Pratt suggested I check-out the Tar Heel Reader. I’ve written about, and used, The Tar Heel Reader a lot. It’s on a bunch of my ‘The Best..” lists. It has a ton of talking stories, and students can create their own. But until Linda had suggested it, I had not realized that their books could be printed-out as PowerPoint presentations. When I tried printing one out, it turned out to be a perfect printable book. Thanks, Linda!
Nellie Edge has several printable books. Thanks to David Deubelbeiss for the tip.
EdHelper has lot of books. It costs a little for a subscription, but is well worth it. At this point, it’s my favorite source next to Raz-Kids.
Measured Mom has sight word printable books.
Super Teacher Worksheet mini-books
Eight Free Downloadable Children’s Books In Khmer – More On The Way (Maybe In Other Languages, Too)
The ESL/ELD Resource Group of Ontario has a lot of printable English/Arabic books and others for ELL Beginners. Thanks to Aaron Douglas for the tip.
Kiz Club was, for years, a great talking-books site for ELLs. That audio support is no longer available (I assume because they used Flash), but you can still print them out.
TextProject has a fair number of freely available and printable eBooks and illustrated vocabulary resources that would be very helpful to English Language Learners. You have to click around a little bit to find them, but they are pretty decent.
Thanks to everybody for your help!
Other suggestions are always welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.
Hello Larry, I’m soooo happy to see my nickname on your box of wonders (aka blog). It was my pleasure to share with you this little humble contribution.
I also noticed the religious flavour of the site but it definitely offers some good resources, especially the printable section which I use very often with my younger students and also for special holidays activities. They have been really helpful on those occasions when sts don’t feel like doing any “curricular stuff” and particularly with students at risk.
I would also like to share with you a very practical (cheap) and effective way of motivating and engaging very difficult students, those who, as a matter of fact, do not want to be at school any longer but they must because our educational legislation says so. A friend of mine ( teaching expert herself in Spanish: psicopedagoga) passed the idea on to me. It consists on making students to colour mandalas. According to the Wikipedia, “In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective”. Trust me, they really work. It is an amazingly easy and cheap method to reinforce concentration and improve behaviour, besides the resulting coloured mandalas are beautiful and can serve as classroom decoration.
In http://www.mandalaproject.org/education/main.html you can find “the mandala approach to teaching” which I didn’t know it even exist until very recently.
http://www.free-mandala.com/es/start.html
http://recopilaciones.arredemo.org/mandalas/
http://mandala-colorier.com/
This long comment (sorry) offers me the possibility of making one suggestion, have you ever considered starting a new list? One such as The Best Teaching Resources for Students placed at Risk (with behavioural, motivational, racial, language problems) academically underachievers, socially incompetent, etc…..
Best regards.
Rosa
When I think about fast, free, accessible and fun (!) books that folks can make themselves, I think of http://www.realebooks.com.
Realebooks are free online family-friendly (really books) picture books created by parents and children in many family literacy programs across the country. They can be written and designed by – you! (teachers, parents, children, students). The software is very simple to use (and did I mention, free or inexpensive?) and even children master the program quite easily and quickly. You can go to the website and see hundreds of these books AND you can even download a free version of the software. You can even put video clips into the online books – and add voice! Way too cool!
Cheers!
Sylvia
I teach adult ELL and I am looking for more mature content for high beginners/low intermediates. Thanks!