As much as I love to encourage the kids to play outside wherever possible and to do other none computer related things when we’re in the house, I have to accept that they’re going to want to play on the internet!
For the most part, I’m happy for them to use the internet – Miss Frugal is required to use it every week to research her homework anyway and I genuinely believe that the right amount of time on the internet is good for them, as long as you make sure that you know exactly what they’re doing online.
We use a mix of educational sites and fun sites and I do limit the amount of time that the computer is turned on for. I also limit the amount of time that I’m online for before they’re in bed as it’s not exactly setting a great example to be playing on my laptop all afternoon while I’m saying no to them.
These are the sites 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 and Movie star planet – Miss Frugal’s favourite games at the moment
- Cbeebies and CBBC
- Show me
- Primary games
- Disney Junior
- Nick Junior
- Bitesize
- Roblox
- Manchester children’s university
And you can’t forget about Youtube which we tend to use a lot as a family – both for educational and entertainment reasons although I make sure that I have the safety search facility switched on (detailed at the bottom of this post) and they’re still only allowed to watch it when I’m in the room with them.
What about you? How do you feel about children online and what sites do you use with your children?
