Places to find free Foundation Phase reading material on the Internet

Nowadays there are so many places where you can find free reading material for your learners on the Internet. I have decided to start keeping a record of these places - they come in so useful in the classroom. Some of these sites are what is known as public domain sites. Every year new publications enter public domain. That means their intellectual property rights have expired or are not applicable any longer. Other sites have Creative Commons texts. They can be downloaded but the original author always has to be acknowledged. Here are just a few useful sites to explore: 

1) The African Storybook Project
http://www.africanstorybook.org/The African Storybook Project (ASP) is a wonderful project originating in South Africa. It is currently creating and encouraging the use of a multilingual, digital library of stories for the first few years of reading (Grades 1-3). The project aims to address the shortage of contextually appropriate books for early reading in the languages of Africa. Their vision is for all young African children to have enjoyable books to read in a familiar language to practise their reading skills and learn to love reading. Users can find, create, translate or adapt stories for early reading. They can download and copy the stories and/or illustrations without having to ask for permission or pay a fee. The stories can be read online or offline or printed from the website.
                       
                                    

2) Storyweaver
https://storyweaver.org.in/
Storyweaver a digital repository of multilingual stories for children from Pratham Books in India. It provides access to stories in many different languages. Story Weaver is an open platform and it is designed to be innovative and interactive.Your learners can read, create, translate, or download a multitude of lovely stories. 

3) Pratham Books - Creative Commons
http://www.prathambooks.org
http://bit.ly/2KdxsCc
Pratham Books is a non-for-profit organization that publishes books in multiple Indian languages to promote reading among children. One of those languages is English. They have joined the Creative Commons bandwagon and have had books translated into many languages. Their audio books have been used as teaching tools by volunteers teaching underprivileged children in their neighbourhood, and much more. 

Pratham have a vast number of books. Find some of the free ones here:
1. Creative Commons Originals - Books : Books created by Pratham Books and licensed under CC.
2. Books in the Public Domain - A list of all their books which are under public domain licenses.
3. Creative Commons Illustrations - A collection of illlustrations from their CC-licensed books.

4) Complete Library of Children’s Books online: Rosetta project
http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/library-complete_index.htm

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.

5) Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg offers over 46,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.  Many of the classics can be found at this site.

6) The International Children's Digital Library
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/
"The mission of the International Children's Digital Library Foundation (ICDL Foundation) is to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. The Foundation pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children. The ICDL Foundation is a non-profit corporation." -The ICDL Foundation

7) Readworks

https://www.readworks.org/
The nonprofit organisation, ReadWorks,  provides K-12 teachers with what to teach and how to teach it—online, for free, to be shared broadly. They provide a large, high-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary lessons, formative assessments, and teacher guidance. 

These are just a few options you might like to investigate. There are many more places that provide freely available reading material for our learners.