What it is: Roy the Zebra is a site for emerging readers complete with interactive stories, games, and lesson plans. The site can be used with interactive white boards or on computers. Emerging reader skills include capital letters, full stops, words that rhyme, high frequency words, alphabetical order, question marks, singular or plural, long vowel phonemes, words within words, and consonants. The Roy the Zebra story collection is online and includes literacy worksheets, before reading discussion sheets, and after reading discussion sheets.
How to integrate Roy the Zebra into the classroom: Roy the Zebra is an excellent literacy website. Use daily with your emerging and struggling readers to enhance your literacy time. Set up Roy the Zebra as a center during literacy time in the one computer classroom. Because of the sites interactivity, it is also an ideal site to use with an interactive white board. If you have access to a computer lab your students can practice the skills learned for the day all together.
Tips: There are advertisements on the site but be assured that all activities, books, lessons, and games are completely free to use. Roy the Zebra does accept donations.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Roy the Zebra in your classroom.
I found this site to be confusing. Things are all over the place, and there is a bee that flaps its wings, distracting the eye (this is on the teachers’ page). The games might be intuitive to game players, but I did not know what to do. On one game, I went to the instructions (which begin with the advice to just start playing), which were quite small and not scalable. The phoneme P was inaudible. I found the sounds irritating, but kids might find them cute. The graphics are cute and colorful.
On another game, there were no instructions. Based on what I did in the first game, I could figure out what to do (click and drag words to place them over dotted lines). But the snap-to-location feature meant that most of the time my words didn’t go where I wanted them to go. I had to undo (will that be clear to a child?) and try again. The ordering was bottom to top but there was no indication that it should be that way (we read top to bottom).
Either there are some grammar mistakes in the texts for teachers, or British English is a lot more different from my American English than I have otherwise experienced.
I could not find any cvc games. CVC is the cornerstone of the way I teach beginning reading, so this is a big lacunae for me.
I have to admit, I haven’t tried this with kids, but my classrooms do not have Internet access, so I can’t test it out with them.
There is a short (5-day) free trial period, then you can buy material. I did not see any advertisements, though.