Spotty Blue Banana

LabTV online by the National Defense Education Program (NDEP) has some interesting videos about science and engineering for older kids. There are over 50 videos from two seasons of webisodes, helping to capture kids’ imaginations and instill an interest in engineering.

The games on CBeebies Alphablocks (from the BBC) can help with early stage literacy, as the child forms words using the available letters or watches the songs letters sing.

Zoopz.com has some interesting logic based maze games for elementary level children.

I came across this excellent site called abcteach. It is nicely categories and has so many worksheets for printing, lots of tools for handwriting, letter/word sorting, word searches, spelling, sudoku. For slightly older children there are maths and science, reading, writing, thinking skills, logic puzzles, and much more. I’d suggest having a good look around.

Here are some online games and logic puzzles that can help you with a bit of geography.

Thanks to Paul Wigfield for pointing me towards Sporcle. It has lots of puzzles to test yourself against the clock. I’ll be returning to it in the future. Here I’m interested in the one’s to help with learning about countries and geography. For example, you can name the countries in Europe

Countries of the World

US States

In a similar way you can use the Lufthansa virtual pilot game to test your knowledge of European city locations against the clock.

Disney has some great online minigames. Some of which really get your youngsters brains working to figure out the logic to solve the puzzles. Three I’d suggest are:

• Motion Potion, where you have to figure out the correct routes for the chemical mixtures,
• Tarzan Coconut Run, where you work out where to place the components to direct the thrown coconut,
• Mickey Robot Roundup, where you have to work out the route; placing the arrows, balloons and umbrellas on the floor to direct the robot Mickey around the obstacles in the correct order to exit the level.

These sites might be of interest if you are wanting to learn how to play the piano.

Zebra keys has 50 lessons of various difficulties aimed at children 13 and over or parents wanting to help their children learn. It has flash animations showing video and sound to help you along.

PianoNanny is a well written explanatory site guiding you through from the initial principles of learning to play. It covers starter, intermediate and advanced studies.

Thanks to Donna Guthrie for putting me on to this one.

Meet me at the corner is full of educational videos for kids; who can also create their own videos and send them for editing and display on the site. This looks good, and I’ll be having more of a look around. I liked the simple instructions about how to make a video podcast, very nice for instructing children (and adults for that matter).

This site acts as a catalogue drawing together free videos with educational value for children.

Site link: http://www.neok12.com/

This is a nice looking site that you can use with young children to promote literacy. It has games, worksheets for printing, software for downloading, and so on.

Site link:http://www.roythezebra.com/