Spotty Blue Banana

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.

Vic Voltage is the cartoon character set to help primary or elementary school children around the Fusebox site about electricity and its history, using interactive flash games, activities and general information.

There are circuit boards to create using drag-and-drop components. You can see how three common electrical things work in the home. There’s a section on safety, which took me back to a public information film of the 70s. You can also play an electrically themed version of hangman.

The site is created by CE Electric UK who supply electricity to many homes in the UK, so they should know what they’re talking about.

If you want to test your brain a little then this Games for the Brain site has a whole set to take your brain out to the gym, including Chinese Checkers, Mastermind, and a lot more.

This page has a great set of links to chemistry related online resources for kids.

It includes The Periodic Table Videos from the University of Nottingham that I’ve previously written about.

One item from the list I’ve had more of a play with (and shown my rusty knowledge with) is The Periodic Table Game.

Dr Mike’s site has lots and lots of printable mathematics sheets for a range of ages. The philosophy is get the kids playing with maths and they’ll enjoy maths.

Crayola is perhaps best known for making crayons. But their website has some great resources and ideas to help with your kids creative side. There is ‘fun and games’ where kids can drag and drop elements onto a ‘page’ and then print it out for colouring, as well as other stuff.

However, I want to specifically concentrate on two zones, namely ‘for educators’ and ‘for parents’.

The ‘for eductors’ has lesson plans via a search option to enable structured art working. I particularly found the Art Tips and Techniques section in Resources useful.

And ‘for parents’ there are lists of arts and crafts you can try out with your children; colouring activities to do, wordsearches, cursive writing practise sheets to print off, and lots more.

The site is well worth a visit, either the US site (.com) or other countries, including the UK site (.co.uk).

The Squigly site has a few very nice games, split into maths, spelling/typing/reading, geography, memory and matching and making connections. Some time dependent games seem a little quick at first, but maybe with practise the kids will get quicker and more accurate.

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.