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Reading
Start with a Book
Start with a Book pairs themed booklists with activity guides, writing ideas and links to multimedia.
This is a planning site for adults, not a place to read books online. A child’s interest in birds, buildings, space or folktales becomes the theme, and each theme suggests something to make, observe, discuss or write after reading. Families who want screen time to lead into another activity are its natural audience.
- Ages
- Adult-led primary-school reading and exploration
- Works on
- Web browser
- Topics
- Reading
- Languages
- English
- Listed
- 2026-10-11
What kids do
- Pick a themed booklist
- Try a writing prompt
- Plan a nature observation
- Pair a story with something to make
Who it suits
Geared to primary-school children reading and exploring with a grown-up, who does most of the choosing.
Notes for parents
The books themselves come from a library or home shelf, and some links lead off to other organizations’ resources.
More Reading
- Epic – Kids' Books & Reading: A digital library where children browse stories and nonfiction, listen to Read-To-Me books and audiobooks, and look up words with an audio dictionary.
- Reading.com: A parent and child go through scripted phonics lessons together, followed by decodable stories and practice games.
- Reading Eggs: Pre-reading, first reading, systematic phonics and later comprehension are split into separate programs aimed at different ages.
- Teach Your Monster to Read: Children design a monster and take it through games that match letters to sounds, blend words and read sentences.
- Hooked on Phonics Learning: Guided reading activities come with an ebook library meant to go alongside the lessons.
- Teach Monster: Reading for Fun: Recipes, signs and instructions are the reading material in a village adventure where helping characters earns books for a monster’s shelf.
- Vooks: Animated storybooks with narration, where each word is highlighted as it is read aloud.
- Endless Reader: Animated words are built letter by letter, dropped into short sentence puzzles and then acted out in a little scene.