Picture books on the IWB (Part 1 of 2)

One of my favourite things to do with a junior primary class and our IWB was to read books on the whiteboard. There are two main ways of doing this:

1. Finding online books.

2. Scanning an existing book and turning it into a flipchart

Today’s post will focus on online books. Here are some good sites I’ve found.

1. Big Universe

This site contains a mix of teachers/ class-made books, and professional books. It’s also got a nifty book creator, so your class can have a go at creating your own and share it on the site.

2. Storyline Online

The books on this site are well known children’s books read by members of the Screen Actors Guild. It gets an extra thumbs up from me for featuring Sophie’s Masterpiece which is a former favourite of my class. The site features streaming video of the actors reading the texts. The pictures in the book are shown and you also have the option of captions.

3. BBC Cbeebies Stories

There’s a great collection of online books here, with clear interesting pictures and some animation. This is the site that I used most with my Year 2 class.

4. International Children’s Digital Library

I only found this site yesterday, and I think it’s an absolute treasure. It has a huge number of books in many different languages. Audio isn’t included, but the text and images are clear, the pages can be enlarged and it has a simple filter function which lets you look for books by age group, length of book, and genre. This link takes you to all the books in English.

5. Lookybook

Lookybook has hundreds of well-known, high quality pictures books. It’s free to register and you can create your own bookshelves with your favourites. The site is designed to attract you to buy the book after having a preview. So the image quality isn’t the best, and the text can be hard to read. Books with minimal text and large pictures work best, so it may be more useful for kindy/ pre-primary teachers.

The next post will explain how you can scan your favourite book to view it on the IWB.