Today, parents have the option to download and read Ebooks off the Internet for absolutely free. Many of these electronic children's books are of contemporary children's stories, but a few of them are also scanned copies of the much loved classic stories that many adults remember from their childhood, complete with all of the wonderful imagery and artwork found in those old antique children's books. The following online resources are a few of the best sites where you can find free Ebooks for children.
The International Children's Digital Library - This website is an amazing resource for teachers, parents, and anyone else who is interested in a free resource where they can find wonderful online Ebooks for children. The books here are not your typical bookstore fare, but many
are award winning stories that children will love.
From the main page, you can choose books by country, browse featured books, look at the most recently added books and more.
While many Ebook sites simply offer the quality of a PDF scan, this website also provides images of the book, but in a higher quality format inside an embedded and easy to use online reader app.
Children's Books Online - When you first visit this website, you may get the impression that it's an amateur website without much content to offer, but you would be mistaken. Even though the website has a pre-Web 2.0 look to it, all of the book scans are organized into reading level, such as early readers, intermediate readers or advanced readers.
The books are only image scans of the actual classic children's books, but they are embedded into an excellent image scrolling tool that acts as a sort of book reader with the title and author information at the top and the book text and imagery displayed at the bottom. As you press the arrows, you can "page" through the book.
Starfall - This website opened in 2002 as a free public service. The site is primarily focused on the phonics approach to learning how to read, and it offers several reading areas for children with animated audio Ebooks for children that will help your toddler understand the sounds of letters and words.
This amazing website takes your child through many levels of reading lessons, with the ability to advance to the next level as they move ahead through the lessons.
Each lesson is very well-designed. Not only can the child read through the story with the narrator, but in each part of the story, your child can click on words in the image and the narrator will help your toddler sound out the letters and show them how to say the entire word based on those sounds.
Storyline Online - This amazing non-profit website was created and is run by the Screen Actors Guild Foundation. This organization created this amazing website to bring books alive for children in a way that few other websites can - by presenting your child's favorite books by well known actors that many children will recognize from television shows and movies.
For example, the President of Storyline, Melissa Gilbert, is shown here reading
My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother. The video shows the actor reading the book, and then switches to display artwork and illustrations from the book. The whole time, the words that are being read are displayed along the bottom of the screen - a caption feature than can be turned on and off using the video controls.
Magic Keys - This website offers a very full section of Ebooks for kids titled "Children's Storybooks Online." This site provides a very comprehensive list of wonderful illustrated online books that children will love to read. Categories of this Ebook collection includes books for young children, books for older children and books for young adults.
The layout of these fantastic Ebooks for children is very simple and clean, with bright and colorful illustrations, and large and clear sentences. While most of the Ebooks consist of just illustrations and text, many of them also include audio files. Your child can click on the picture of a speaker and hear a narrator read the book to them.
These websites are just a few examples of the growing world of online books for children of all ages. Ebooks offer parents and educators a wonderful opportunity to expose children to stories in a way that is not only convenient and simple, but in a format that can be tailored to enhance the reading skills of young readers. Whether you want to use these Ebooks simply to enjoy stories with your child, or you want to use them in a classroom to teach young children how to read, these websites are a perfect place to start.