Starfall
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Source: www.starfall.com
What is it?
Starfall is an educational website in which students are able to practice phonics and phonemic awareness through games and activities. It is free to use, no sign up needed. It is perfect for students in preschool to second grade! It is also great for special education, ELL and ESL. All you need to do is go to www.starfall.com and students can begin using immediately.
Educational Uses
Starfall can be used to help students practice phonics and phonemic awareness. It could be used during literacy centers.
Possible content standards:
Kindergarten Reading Standards Foundational skills
Phonics and Word Recognition
3. Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
a. Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary sound or many of the most
frequent sounds for each consonant.
b. Associate the long and short sounds with common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels.
c. Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g. the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does).
d. Distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ.
Assessment
It would be difficult to assess students, because students are on a public website and students do not have accounts to save any information. If improvement is being shown in other literacy based instruction that would be a way to assess how Starfall is working for students.
Value
Pros: Starfall is free, fun, and easy to navigate.
Cons: It is a public website therefore I it would be easy for students to navigate away from the page. There could also be an interference of pop-ups when students are using this program.
References