Official Site of The State of New Jersey
Literacy Resources and Interventions for Students with Disabilities
Literacy is essential to learning. The New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) believes teachers should be supported; that all students have the ability to learn and deserve culturally, linguistically, and accessible literacy instruction, the highest quality evidence-based instructional support, and the intensive literacy acceleration needed to flourish in school and life. Therefore, the NJDOE adheres to the philosophy of developmentally appropriate reading instruction that is guided by decades of research across multiple disciplines. Evidence-based early reading instruction should incorporate the foundational elements of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension as noted in the National Reading Panel Report (2000) and other respected research; as well as, background knowledge, writing, and motivation. The NJDOE has consistently held firm to the reciprocity of reading and writing instruction, and its benefit to students, as skills and strategies are cultivated in an integrated system of literacy instruction in the classroom (NJDOE Practice Profile, 2022).
Find activities, materials, and resources with which your students will engage by exploring the collection of resources below. Please note that the links provided are suggestions for resources and do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the New Jersey Department of Education of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individuals.
- 25 Activities for Reading and Writing Fun - Engage in activities with your children to promote their reading and writing skills while having fun.
- BrainPop | Reading Skills - A group of educational websites with over 1,000 short animated movies for students in grades K-12, together with quizzes and related materials, covering the subjects of science, social studies, English, math, engineering and technology, health, and arts and music.
- Bringing Hogwarts to You - J.K. Rowling, Audible, Bloomsbury, OverDrive, Pottermore Publishing and Scholastic introduce Harry Potter At Home to help children, parents, caregivers, and teachers add a touch of Harry Potter magic to our new daily lives.
- Early Literacy Resources | Reading Rockets - Recommended links for early literacy skills.
- Get Ready to Read! - Designed to support educators, parents, and young children in the development of early literacy skills in the years before kindergarten.
- Into the Book: Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies - A bilingual reading comprehension resource for elementary students and teachers focused on eight research-based strategies: Using Prior Knowledge, Making Connections, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Summarizing, Evaluating and Synthesizing.
- Lalilo | Online Phonics program for Distance Learning - A free online K-2 literacy program with a strong focus on phonics and comprehension for kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd-grade teachers and students.
- NAEYC | Literacy - Developmentally appropriate approaches to literacy.
- Oxford Owl for Home: help your child learn at home- An award-winning primary platform developed by Oxford University Press offering free online teaching, learning, and assessment resources.
- Sesame Street in Communities - Home- Hundreds of bilingual multi-media tools to help kids and families enrich and expand their knowledge during the early years of birth through six, a critical window for brain development.
- Starfall Education: Kids Games, Movies, & Books K-3 - Specializing in reading, phonics & math - educational games, movies, books, songs, and more for children K-3.
- Space Rangers Toolkit - Includes 5 topics for exploration through fiction and nonfiction books, hands-on activities, new vocabulary, and fun writing prompts. Also includes recommendations for kid-friendly websites and apps, a space exploration timeline, a list of inventions from space, complete book and vocabulary lists, and more!
- Teacher Resources | American Literature - Free resources for teaching reading, writing, and critical thinking skills
- Writing Activities for Kids - A collection of writing activities from Education.com.
- AdLit | All About Adolescent Literacy - A rich, multimedia library of free, research-based resources to support your students in grades 6-12.
- Bringing Hogwarts to You - J.K. Rowling, Audible, Bloomsbury, OverDrive, Pottermore Publishing and Scholastic introduce Harry Potter At Home to help children, parents, caregivers and teachers add a touch of Harry Potter magic to our new daily lives.
- Folger Shakespeare Library: Offers a world of online resources for teachers -- from lesson plans to study guides to videos -- for teaching Shakespeare on the K-12 levels.
- Literature Resources | PBS Learning Media.org - Explores the main themes of written language. Study main ideas and compare and contrast central characters of a story. Middle and high school poets can study figurative language, imagery, and symbolism using an interactive lesson on "Caged Bird" by Maya Angelou. Teachers can integrate literature and social studies with the "The Amazing Adventures of Equiano" interactive. Text structure, making inferences, and levels of text complexity are among the additional topics that are examined.
- myShakespeare | Love to learn it. - Free media-rich, full-text online editions of Shakespeare's plays with interactive content, videos, contemporary translations, study tools, and more.
- Shakespeare’s Plays Animated: The Animated Shakespeare brings to life famous Shakespeare plays.
- Teacher Resources | American Literature - Free resources for teaching reading, writing, and critical thinking skills
AUDIOBOOKS
- 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free - Download hundreds of free audiobooks, mostly classics, to your computer. Find authors such as Twain, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov, HG Wells & more.
- Digital Book | Browse free audiobooks and eBooks
- LibriVox | free public domain audiobooks
- Light Up Your Brain | Free Audio Stories for Children
- Loyal Books | Free Public Domain Audiobooks & eBook Downloads
- OverDrive - Borrow and read free ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines from your library using your phone or tablet. It’s easy to get started―all you need is a library card!
- Project Gutenberg | Online Audio Book Catalog - Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution” of eBooks and audiobooks. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books.
- UDL Tech Toolkit | Audio Books - A collection of online audiobook resources to make learning accessible to all students.
- Storyline Online - The SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Daytime Emmy nominated, Storyline Online, features celebrated actors including Viola Davis, Kristen Bell, and Chris Pine reading books for young readers.
- Storytime From Space - A project of the Global Space Education Foundation, that sends children’s books to the International Space Station. While in space, astronauts videotape themselves reading these books to the children of Earth.
- Vooks - A streaming library of ad-free, kid-safe animated read-aloud storybooks to provide children with 20 minutes a day of read-aloud time and activities.
EBOOKS
- 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices - Download 800 free eBooks to your Kindle, iPad/iPhone, computer, smartphone or e-reader. The collection includes great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including works by Asimov, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Neil Gaiman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf & James Joyce
- Epic | The Leading Digital Library for Kids | Unlimited Access to 40,000 of the Best Children's Books & Learning Videos
- International Children's Digital Library: ICDL - Provides free access to high-quality children's books from around the world in different languages, including Arabic, Afrikaans, Danish, English, Farsi and beyond.
- Loyal Books | Free Public Domain Audiobooks & eBook Downloads
- National Emergency Library: Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming - A collection of books supporting emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.
- OverDrive - Borrow and read free ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines from your library using your phone or tablet. All you need is a library card to get started!
- Project Gutenberg | Online eBook Catalog - Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution” of eBooks and audiobooks. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books.
- EDSITEment! Neh.gov - Lesson plans, teacher’s guides and student activities for Humanities education Grade K-12.
- Google Lit Trips - The essence of the Google Lit Trips project is the use of Google Earth to create immersive 3D literary field trips where students virtually become traveling companions with characters in stories commonly taught in grades kindergarten through high school.
- Language Arts Educational Videos - WatchKnowLearn organizes thousands of free educational video clips in all subjects for teachers, students, and parents. Select from a subcategory or choose from additional subject areas.
- Newsela: Instructional Content Platform - An instructional content tool allowing teachers to find articles with appropriate reading levels, featuring questions and writing prompts, for their students.
- Out-of-School Time - National Center for Families Learning offers a range of free resources to meet different literacy and education challenges.
- PBS Learning Media | Language Arts - Browse standards-aligned ELA resources for students in all grades.
- Reading Rockets | Launching Young Readers - Reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in helping struggling readers build fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.
- Reading Rockets | Reading Adventure Packs for Families - a set of reading adventure packs to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books.
- ReadWorks.org - A resource for reading passages and lesson plans for K-12 teachers, including pre-made worksheets, quizzes, and other printable materials to enhance the lesson.
- ReadWriteThink | Classroom Resources - Subject-specific curriculum sites managed in part by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
- TeachingBooks | Author & Book Resources to Support Reading Education - An engaging collection of resources that brings books to life.
- English Language Arts Lesson Plans & Activities - Share My Lesson offers free lesson plans, teacher resources and classroom activities created by educators.
- UDL TechToolkit - Online literacy tools to make learning accessible to all students.
- 11 Language Development Strategies for ELs | Brookes Publishing - Promote second language acquisition and literacy skills for English learners (ELs) with these eleven effective strategies.
- AdLit: Teaching English Language Learners - AdLit is a national multimedia project that provides educators and families with resources to lift struggling readers and writers in middle school and high school.
- Center for Open Educational Resources for Language Learning |COERLL - Funded by the U.S. Department of Education to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
- Colorín Colorado | A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners
- Coronavirus: Multilingual Resources for Schools - A collection multilingual fact sheets and infographics to share information on the coronavirus
- English Language Project | Next Vista - A collection of hundreds of very short videos to supplement the language learning efforts of people around the globe.
- ISTE Latino COVID-19 - Spanish language resources for remote learners
- Microsoft Translator for Education - The Microsoft Translator conversation feature translates live, in-person conversations, enabling two or more people to interact either one-on-one or for larger group interactions.
- Mosaic: An Integrated Approach to Mathematics, Science, Technology, & Language | SEDL - A K–5 supplemental instructional program that provides lessons and resources that integrate math, science, and technology while supporting English learners and academic language skills.
- Duoreader is available via web, android and iOS and offers a collection of classic texts. It currently supports Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, and Russian and provides an adjustable read-aloud feature, allowing for different accents and reading speeds.
- Paso Partners - Integrating Mathematics, Science and Language: An Instructional Program | SEDL - Lesson plans for K-3 teachers designed to increase the achievement of ELL in science and math.
- EDUCATIONAL EQUITY & CORONAVIRUS - Focus on Multilingual Learners
- ISTE Latino COVID-19 - Spanish language resources for remote learners
- Languages on the Web - Short stories in English translated into many languages in a convenient parallel text format to help you learn them more quickly and easily.
- Teaching Multilingual Learners Online - WIDA reached out to educators in the WIDA International School Consortium to identify some of the unique opportunities and challenges for multilingual learners in online environments.
- SpeakyReads - Improve your Speaking, Listening and Spelling - Advanced speaking, listening and spelling practice in English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish
- Special Education and Your Child | Colorin Colorado - Special Education and Your Child: FAQs for Multilingual Families
- TeachVid - Home: Teach languages with videos - Online tool that uses flipped learning and lessons to teach foreign languages and ESL students.
- LRC-S Quick Tip | Translation Tools from Google - Discover new ways to support English Language Learners and bilingual families with these free translation tools from Google.
- Center on Instruction - Research-based resources on instruction, targeting students with difficulties learning mathematics, students needing intensive instruction, or special needs/diverse learners, including English language learners.
- CommonLit | Free Reading Passages and Literacy Resources - A nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students, especially students in Title I schools, graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond.
- Intervention Central: Response to Intervention | RTI | RTI Resources - Provides teachers, schools and districts with free resources to help struggling learners and implement Response to Intervention.
- National Center on Improving Literacy | Schools & Districts - Find evidence-based approaches and effective professional development to screen, identify, and teach students with literacy-related difficulties. Includes toolkits, videos, research briefs and infographics, Q&A with experts, and other resources around topics such as beginning reading, dyslexia, remote learning, interventions, legislation, and screening.
- National Council of Teachers of English | Resources - Online resources, communities and groups to help provide professional support throughout the many stages of your teaching career.
- National Center on Response to Intervention - Provides technical assistance to states and districts and builds the capacity of states to assist districts in implementing proven response to intervention frameworks.
- Text Project - Strategies, tools, and texts to bring beginning readers and struggling readers to high levels of literacy.
- The Best Evidence Encyclopedia (BEE) - A website created by Johns Hopkins University School of Education, Center for Research and Reform (CRRE) providing easy-to-read, reviews of various types of K-12 education programs, including early childhood programs, elementary and secondary reading and math programs, and programs for struggling students and English-language learners.
- The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading - A collaborative effort by foundations, nonprofit partners, business leaders, government agencies, states and communities across the nation to ensure that more children in low-income families succeed in school and graduate prepared for college, a career, and active citizenship.
- The International Dyslexia Association - An international organization that concerns itself with the complex issues of dyslexia.
- UFLI Virtual Teaching Resource Hub - Designed to assist teachers as they explore new ways to teach foundational reading skills using technology. This site has tools for reading instruction and intervention with children in the elementary grades.
- What Works Clearinghouse - Reviews existing research on different programs, products, practices, and policies in education with a goal of providing educators with the information they need to make evidence-based decisions.