Animated Christmas

Animated Christmas is a good resource with many things to explore. In particular your students may want to look at the interactive animated storybook, Fir Tree.

Might be a nice addition to a multicultural winter celebration unit.

Speakaboos Stories

Here's another option for online stories for elementary aged students: Speakaboos. Currently there is a fun (and age appropriate for somewhat older students) version of A Christmas Carol and five other December stories including the Dreidel Song.

Additionally there are favorites like Arthur and Curious George, fables, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folktales and lullabies. Soon you will be able to record your own stories and download the stories for use off line or even on an iPod for 99 cents.

The site is currently in public beta (which means that it may eventually cost money, change features or disappear). You can get nearly all the features without going through the lengthy and privacy challenging sign-up process.

As for adaptability the stories are videos not animations of pages turning, thus your cannot do the old "put the mouse arrow over the button to turn the page" trick to make it accessible. However, you can put the mouse arrow over the play/pause button - for all that is worth. Oh and these stories should be super fun on a "big screen".

Read Aloud Christmas Stories for Switch Users

Northpole.Com has some (non-religious) Christmas stories that can be read aloud, on most of them the "next page" button stays in the same spot, so you can put your mouse pointer over it and have switch users turn the pages.

Note: for some bizarre reason the sound on these is not working in Firefox on my computer, but does work in Internet Explorer, so if you aren't getting sound try a different browser. Wait... I reinstalled Adobe Flash Player and now sound is working! So quick tip if for some reason you suddenly loose sound in Firefox, reinstall the Flash Plugin.

Two More Online Stories Sites

• Ziggity Zoom
• MisCositas

These will be added to Alternate Format Books and Stories.

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo (who got the link from Langwitches) and a poster on QIAT for the links.