ABCya!

            ABCya! (http://www.abcya.com/) is a fun educational learning website that is filled with more than 300 games, storybooks, and other activities for students in Pre-K through 5^th grade. This award-winning website was designed by a school teacher to engage students in hundreds of learning activities that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards and the foundational skills in reading, language, and math. ABCya! is completely free for laptop and desktop users. However, a family plan or classroom monthly subscription is needed for access to the application on a mobile device. Whether students learn on a computer or mobile device, they will be engaged in the hundreds of educational learning activities ABCya! has to offer.

            Upon opening the homepage on ABCya!, users will be able to select their desired grade level from Pre-K through 5^th Grade. They will then be taken to a new page that is filled with activities that are designed for specific grade levels. The grade level categories are broken down by content categories to include numbers, letters, shapes, social studies, art, strategies, and holidays. Images of the activities within each category are shown and a description is given to help users determine the activity’s focus skills. It also offers a few “How to” videos that will allow students to follow and create crafts.

            The Word Games category of each grade level consists of activities that increase in difficulty as they get older. Beginning with Pre-K, the literacy games focus on skills that build letter recognition, tracing, and matching. Kindergarten literacy games consist of some of the same games from Pre-K, however, additional games that focus on skills such as keyboarding, alphabetical order, consonant blends, sight words, upper and lower-case matching, story creator, and story books have been added. The first-grade literacy games also consist of similar games with the addition of contractions, make a word, and spelling skills. Second grade literacy games reinforce skills from prior years, however, additional games included are cross word puzzles, nouns and verbs, word clouds, and letter creators. Additional third-grade literacy games focus on skills to include parts of speech, synonyms and antonyms, spelling with vowels, and technology vocabulary. Fourth grade literacy games focus on skills such as antonyms, synonyms, homonyms, riddle books, and subject verb agreement. Finally, the fifth-grade activities consist of all similar games that reinforce the skills learned in second, third, and fourth grade.

            ABCya! is an effective literacy website that focuses on building literacy skills in reading and language. These games are created with animation and color that entice students to continue learning. In addition, the storybooks provide a read aloud and highlighting feature in which children can either read or be read to, and follow along. ABCya! also allows teachers to discover educational games that are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. This enables them to use these activities with their students to reinforce skills they are teaching in the regular classroom. With the amount of educational games provided on computers and mobile apps of ABCya!, children are able to continuously learn literacy skills that progress through grade levels both at home and at school.