The free shelf: sites worth bookmarking for kids' English
Aylara A.
Kids' teacher · founder of AylaraTalks
Rules for this list: everything on it has a real free tier you can teach from tomorrow, no card required; each entry says what the site is BEST at, because none of them — ours included — is best at everything.
For songs and video: Super Simple
Super Simple Songs remains the gold standard for young-learner music: slow, clear, gesture-ready. Nothing on this list — us included — competes with a class singing Baby Shark's calmer cousins. Use it for the musical five minutes every lesson deserves.
For early reading: Starfall
Starfall's ABC and learn-to-read sections have taught a generation of native-speaker children to blend, and they work for ESL too. Its aesthetic is dated and its scope stops at reading — but for tap-the-letter phonics it has earned its bookmarks.
For official exam prep: LearnEnglish Kids
The British Council's kids' site is the safest recommendation in ESL: free, ad-free, pedagogically careful, and aligned with the Cambridge exams. Its games are worthier than they are thrilling — pair it with livelier tools and it anchors a curriculum.
For interactive worksheets: Wordwall & Liveworksheets
Wordwall turns any list into a dozen game templates; Liveworksheets turns any PDF into a self-checking exercise. Both have limits on the free tier and both are worth them. They shine for homework you can see was done.
And where we fit
AylaraTalks' lane is the no-account classroom: printable packs with audio, game worlds that run on the teacher's screen in one click, and the trilingual support layer (EN/RU/ES) the sites above don't carry. We link the competition because a teacher with the whole shelf teaches better than a teacher locked in anyone's garden — ours included.
⭐ Take this with you
Songs from Super Simple, first blending on Starfall, exam anchoring from the British Council, interactive homework on Wordwall — and the no-login classroom layer from us. The free shelf is deep; use all of it.
🎈 Put it into play
Everything here pairs with our free classroom games — no prep, no accounts.
About the author
Aylara A.
Kids' teacher · founder of AylaraTalks
Aylara is a kids' teacher who spent years hand-making every classroom game — cutting cards and drawing boards on paper sheets. She created AylaraTalks so no teacher has to start from a blank page again.