Literature and Reading Software

Accelerated Reader
Renaissance Learning
http://www.renlearn.com
Reading management software including quizzes and record-keeping, intended to motivate students more books.

Adventure Workshop
Broderbund
A package of several games in which students must read letters, diaries, newsletters, and excerpts from classics to collect clues and solve a mystery. The program features animation and sound effects.

Discis Books
A book series available on CD-ROM. Students can click on words or pictures to get labels, pronunciations, sound effects, syllable divisions, and explanations. Words that are clicked can be saved in recall lists that the teacher can check. Activity guides accompany the CD-ROMs to give teachers ideas for story preparation, connections, and extensions.

Living Books series
Broderbund
This series of CD-ROM books offers many familiar children's titles, as well as some new selections. The pages contain text and illustrations, just as are found in printed books, but offer the reader a variety of options, such as having the story read in different languages or clicking on the pictures to trigger entertaining animations.

Great Scary Imaginings
Humanities Software
A computer program designed to go with Mercer Mayer's book, There's a Nightmare in My Closet (The Dial Press, 1968). It contains a database of activities to encourage children to write about the story with a compatible word-processing program.

Oregon Trail
The Learning Company
Simulation software that lets students solve the problems faced by settlers who traveled west on the Oregon Trail.

Reading Galaxy
RiverDeep
A software program that provides practice in reading comprehension skills and strategies.

Wiggleworks: Scholastic Beginning Literacy System
Scholastic
An early-literacy program that presents established children's books on CD-ROM. Students can also record sentences in their own voices, enter the sentences into the computer and have the computer read, in synthetic speech, what has been entered, and replay their recorded speech for comparison.

Windows on Science
SRA
Videodisc-based science program that integrates reading and writing. Some of the same authors have also created a DVD-based science program called Fresh Science, from Fresh Science company.

Writing to Read
IBM
A computer-based program that attempts to teach reading through an approach that involves tactile, visual, and auditory senses. Not all Writing to Read activities involve computers.