It’s amazing what children can do these days, Miss Frugal has just completed a Power Point presentation about endangered animals and e mailed it to her teacher – with no help at all from me!
Even though she’s only nine, she has her own laptop (pink, of course) and her own e mail account. Both her internet access and the e mails are subject to parental controls and the laptop we bought her comes with two different start up screens depending on whether you log on as an adult or a child. The children’s desktop allows her to use the internet using a child friendly browser and the only pages that she can access are ones that have been either already been deemed as child friendly or by me entering a password so I’m confident that she can only access sites that I approve of on her laptop.
There are obviously dangers to allowing children to use the internet but I believe that the benefits they’ll get from being able to use the internet appropriately far outweigh these potential dangers.
The sites that we use regularly are:
- Woodlands Junior School site – a fantastic resource for all subjects in the curriculum. Our school use this site with the children on a regular basis and Miss Frugal loves it as she can show me what she’s learning about at school.
- Teaching Tables – a brilliant site for teaching times tables. Lots of games, activities and worksheets.
- Primary Resources – some great ideas on here on activities you can do to support your child’s learning in all areas of the curriculum.
- Moshi Monsters / Club Penguin / Bin weevils - These are all online virtual world games that you can play for free or for a fuller version of the game, you can pay a monthly subscription fee (between £4 and £5). You can make friends with people online and send them messages so we have a rule that we only add people who we know in real life. These games are actually quite enjoyable and surprisingly, there is quite a lot of educational content and mini games.
- Zui.com - an all in one site for children with a child friendly search engine, links to games, videos and other child friendly websites.
- Lego.com – Everyone loves Lego so we love the games on the Lego website.
- Skylanders – There’s an online version of the popular Skylanders game which isn’t as much fun but it kept Master Frugal quiet before we got the actual game.
- Disney Superbia – This is a bit of a new one to us as we’ve only just seen it advertised in the last week but so far Miss Frugal loves it.
We also have our own little computer club every week where I teach Miss Frugal something computery – we do this because she wasn’t given a place in the school computer club as she already knew everything they were going to be teaching and it was over-subscribed!
I’d love to know if you have any other suggestions for child friendly websites (or any ideas for computer club)….
Just awesome!
I just setup my 6 yr old daugther's computer and was setting up "favorites" when I stumbled on your site. The suggestions are perfect for her "growing" mind and I quickly added your links. Thank you, thank you and thank you!!!!
Keep 'em coming
I'm glad you found some good ones x x
Bel loves history related things and I found this one which is games from museums all over the uk – it also gives ideas for places to visit in the future http://www.show.me.uk/games/games.html
That sounds like a good one – especially for ideas on where to visit x x
Try http://www.primarygames.co.uk/ . There are some fun games for primary children. (Some of them might stretch the parents a bit too!)
Ah that's another one we sometimes go on that I forgot about – thanks very much x x
Manchesters Childrens university is fabulous!
I'll have to have a look at that one – thanks very much x
PS if Miss Frugal would like an email penpal, I have just the daughter….x
She's love a pen pal – e mail me if you want and I can give you my address
Cass@frugalfamily.co.uk
My 9 year old daughter loves Web rangers http://www.webrangers.com. It's American, but all about the National Parks and very educational
Ooh that's another one I've never heard of to check out x x
We also use Cbeebies, CBBC, Bitesized, letters and sounds, Fronter, Disney Junior, Nick Jnr and for smaller children poisson Rouge is fab
CBBC – how could I forget that one?
I've never heard of a few of those so I'll have a good look over the weekend x
Hi, we've found another one that is connected to Moshi Monsters – tutpup.com. This site has competitions using times tables and you can compete against other people to gain cups. Sam
Ah I've never heard of that one – thanks very much x