URL www.worldbookonline.com/home

Grade level PreS–Gr 2

Cost $99. Pricing listed is based on individual access. For discounted multi-user pricing, please contact World Book customer service.

Overview This online resource offers the youngest learners a range of content covering various high-interest topics in an ad-free portal. Children can safely explore the resources in over 125 videos, 350 photographs, and 400 games that cover popular early learning topics, such as animals, vehicles and transportation, and concepts like letters and numbers. The navigation is approachable for youngsters with friendly, animated icons. There is content for emergent readers with ebooks that follow the Guided Reading approach that many schools are moving away from in favor of Science of Reading-rooted approaches. Early Learning is available to purchase as an add-on or stand-alone product.

Content When students click on Sea Creatures, they navigate to informational entries illustrated with a hodgepodge of imagery, including cartoons, photos, and realistic illustrations. Students can opt for the simple text to be read aloud by an unenthusiastic young narrator that sounds as if it is generated by AI. Scrolling down, learners will find very short videos, 10-15 seconds each, of sea creatures with better narration accompanied by captions. There are also a variety of games and activities that pair with each theme, including matching, mazes, true or false quizzes, coloring, find the difference puzzles, and paint by numbers. Ebook readers, with underwater and ocean themes, are sourced from the site’s library. Finally, a gallery of sea creature photos is accessible at the bottom of the page. The content is organized in a similar way for the other topics, including dinosaurs, weather, animal homes, and trees.

The Early Learning Basics section for preschool and kindergarten is the weakest element of the product. With only four areas—Fun with Words, Count and Play, Once Upon a Time, and Welcome to Reading—this section is light on content. Users will be disappointed to see there are only four math activities, all counting, and only five letter-based activities, which mostly involve letter tracing and the alphabet song. The Welcome to Reading section, which is World Book’s guided reading program, includes folk and fairy tales, nonfiction, realistic stories, and a series starring a scarecrow named Trek. The Lexile reading level is listed on the cover image of most titles. The interior imagery is a melange of photos and textbook-like illustrations. The stories are standard early reader fare with about 12 of the scarecrow stories also appearing in Spanish. These tales can be accessed via thematic groupings or from the Early Learning Basics icon at the top of the screen. Young readers can select Once Upon a Time for folk and fairy tales and nursery rhymes, or Welcome to Reading, where books can be selected by guided reading levels A-D. While some of the lesson plans point to phonics and letter-sound connections in the teacher section of the site, there is very little explicit phonic instruction in the program.

The content loads with ease on most devices and the goal is to make it “device agnostic” for universality’s sake, but much of the site’s content is not practical for mobile devices, particularly the games and the audio. The games and activities, created using Unity, employ a simple point-and-click interface and work well on a touch screen. Users can expand the window to full screen. While the autoplay captions and text-to-voice options make the content accessible, alternative text for images is nowhere to be found, limiting usefulness for those with low vision. On the Educator pages, an audio icon can be clicked to activate sound when the mouse rolls over the image. In the Early Learning FAQs, the developers state they launch new content or features to the site through a regular development cycle that occurs every two weeks.

Teacher Resources In the For Grown-Ups section, teachers, parents, and caregivers can find educator tools. The introductory text touts that the site offers “rich resources designed for easy integration into the classroom curriculum, public library programming, or learning at home.” The Curriculum Correlation section displays searchable Common Core, U.S. state-based, and International Baccalaureate standards via a dropdown menu, where the content is hyperlinked to the correlating standard. The Guided Reading program offers lesson plans for each title as well as a printable, foldable book.

Verdict Schools, public libraries, and other programs with World Book content for older children may want to offer this as an add-on for their users, particularly for the younger end of their demographic. The informational content, videos, photos, and nonfiction ebook content will be the most useful for youngsters developing early research skills on popular topics of interest. Schools and public libraries searching for digital content to build early learning skills, particularly reading and math, should look to other products, particularly if they use Science of Reading-based approaches.

Rachel G. Payne, Brooklyn Public Library, (NY),is the coauthor of SLJ’s First Steps column.