At least once a day I say, “What did people do before the internet?” Anything you want to know, and things you may wish you didn’t know, are all there at your fingertips.
But what do we do with this information overload, especially when it comes to our children. There are so many websites out there, how do you determine which ones are good for your children without having to weed through thousands of bad ones.
I have a few to share that are popular in my home.
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Educational:
I found this website recently, and think it ties into the theme of handipoints nicely. It is a simple and fun way to learn about spending and saving money. It answers all questions about money in easy to understand language that is accessible to children. It is one of my new favorites.
Do your children ask you questions that you don’t know the answers to? This website has concise answers to questions ranging from, “How does a solar battery work?” to “What is the history of Mother’s Day?” to “How does jello work?” I’ll admit, I didn’t know the answers to any any of those questions until I read about them there. Send your kids here when they have one of those type of questions.
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Just for fun:
Does anyone who has young school aged children not know about webkinz? Webkinz are little stuffed animals that you buy at the store. Each comes with it’s own unique code. You log into the webkinz website and are then able to “buy” things for your pet by completing various virtual tasks.
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This site is chock full of videos for your children…with parental supervision. If you are not familiar with the website, it is short videos that are uploaded . I just spent two hours reliving my youth of 1970’s by watching Schoolhouse Rock videos. If you are old enough to remember, “I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capital Hill…” take a stroll down memory lane and bring your kids along.
Youtube is a video sharing website, where anyone can upload and share any video. While they do have restrictions on the type of content that is permitted to be uploaded, there are still many things that are not for children. Just like the rest of the internet I suppose. Any sort of videos on any topic and be found using the search feature on the website. Want to see whales? locomotives? the Wiggles? It’s all there.
I would be remiss, and never forgiven by my children, if I did not mention the lego website. Or more specifically the lego Bionicle website. It has games. Pictures of bionicles. And uh, more bionicles! Since I am not a boy between the ages of 5 and 12 I don’t understand the appeal of this site at all. But they love it.
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Surfing the world wide web , or we are all information junkies:
This is a database of over 600 subjects that was compiled by librarians specifically for children. This is a great tool for doing research projects. All links are commercial free and non-violent.
This is the kid version of the popular adult search engine yahoo! My children have this as their default homepage on their computers.
This is a collaborative ecyclopedia that is written and edited by the people who are reading it. Many schools do not allow wikipedia as a source for a research papers and I know that many parents do not agree with it. But I also remember when I was in school not being allowed to use a regular encyclopedia either.
