The 21st Century Teacher

We purchased a classroom license for every class in our building and we have decided to renew for next year.  The kids can't get enough Raz-Kids and are reading so much!

Raz-kids.com is a website published by Learning A-Z that provides an online library of  interactive leveled books and quizzes for young readers. Raz-Kids is a reading development site where students grades K-6 can go to hear fluent modeled reading, practice reading skills and check comprehension using an online library of hundreds of books written at 27 developmental levels. Using the website, students can listen to books, read  books, record themselves reading and take interactive online quizzes to measure comprehension. The website also provides an online management tool for teachers to create student rosters, assign books and reading levels, and track student activities.

Since students in a typical class are spread over a range of developmental levels, Raz-Kids provides another option to teachers for differentiated reading instruction among students of varying abilities. Raz-Kids reading levels correlate with other leveled reading programs, including Reading Recovery, Fountas & Pinnell and DRA, so that teachers can readily identify the right level of books for students in the online bookroom.

Raz-Kids could be used in the classroom by students working independently during center time or by students at home for reading homework. Raz-kids is promoted as a good resource for ESOL students since the listen mode models fluent reading for students while tracking the words as they are read. In addition, in the reading mode a student can hear the pronunciation of a difficult word by clicking on it. These tools may be useful to an emerging reader of English. Raz-Kids is also promoted as a good way to encourage reading that can be monitored by the teacher over the summer break, and as a positive way to foster the school-home connection by encouraging students to read from home using their passwords and home computers.