Anyone have any favorite websites for their kids to be on? I'm a huge (HUGE) fan of starfall.com, especially the alphabet section for younger kids. But I find that most of the others that get recommended on various internet lists are nothing more than a few coloring pages and miniature videogames, and crappy ones at that. We have videogame systems for that! I'm looking for something a little more educational...
Starfall is great. Jamey started using it early last year and when they began using it in his kindergarten class, he was already familiar with most of the stories.
Another good one is Club Penguin. Our kids love it. I haven't seen a lot of it, yet, but it looks neat.
Well if you have one who's interested in space, the kids pages at nasa.gov will probably be good. (I probably wouldn't have left the house if we'd had that when I was in grade school.)
Science News puts out
www.sciencenewsforkids.org. My daughter has done more than one school project based on an article from there.
She also enjoys the
Lemonade Stand game.
My bosses' daughter loves the cbeebies website -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/fun/
I don't know if you need to be familiar with the characters to enjoy it though.
Actually, SG, we do have several of the shows. Bob the Builder, Charlie and Lola, Lazy Town, Pinky Dinky Doo... Some are originally British, and some are transplants in the other direction. I hate how most of our kids' channels are programmed for younger kids in the mornings and older kids in the afternoon. Why can't there be one channel for younger kids and one channel for older kids, all the time?
And Steve, I'm embarrassed to admit that I got briefly addicted to the lemonade game myself. :)
here are a couple i have used before -
www.kidsdomain.com
www.crayola.comActually, SG, we do have several of the shows... Charlie and Lola
I love Charlie and Lola. It's so similar to my childhood, children talking together and imagining their own version of the world - everyday imagination. Then again it's proabably made by people my age.
My kids go to pbskids.org a lot.
what about science or museum type sites, like Discovery Kids or Smithsonian kids?
What would a Cellar for kids site look like?
eek! that would be child abuse fo sure!
The Yahoo sites are good if you help your kid register as a kid. They direct them to lots of fun games etc.
We used to use
www.dogpile.com for our metasearch engine, but now use
www.zoo.com which is kid friendly and will block junk from coming up in the search.
Um... I did a test search for "princess" on zoo.com... the results list, paraphrased:
1. Ad for Princess Cruises
2. Ad for Princess Cruises
3. Very mildly informational site on how Princess Cruiseships are made
4. Ad for Princess Cruises
5. Disney Princess Official Site
6. IMDB result
7. Ad for Princess Cruises
8. Ad for Princess Cruises
9. Ad for Princess Cruises
10. Ad for Princess Cruises
I mean, no porn came up, which is nice, but I would hardly say it "blocks junk"...
I mean, no porn came up, which is nice, but I would hardly say it "blocks junk"...
Uh...I should have been more specific. Junk=sexually explicit web search results. I'm afraid we are stuck with the other junk (ads, promotionals, etc.) as a permanent fixture on the net. Thanks for pointing that out.