Poisson Rouge or Red Fish Soup is my absolute favourite children’s game site.  It has more than a hundred games, but they are grouped into categories that make them easy to find and check out.  It covers just about everything – mouse skills, literacy, maths, languages, music, colours, and art all using everyday themes like insects, transport, space and toys rather than commercial characters.

It’s designed to be used independently by children – after an initial screen there is a playroom scene, clicking on different toys takes you to a different set of games.  It is very intuitive with no written instructions at all.  Everything works by either a mouseover or click with bright, obvious movements to catch attention.  There are a wide range of games, from a simple jack-in-the-box to colour matching to complicated arithmetic.  There is even an imaginative game where kids can create a puppet show with fairy tale characters.

It doesn’t matter what age people are, there are three practical skills they need in order to be independent on computers and the internet – using a mouse (or finger on a touchscreen), clicking and preferably double clicking, and being able to find links and menus.  Obviously this is leaving out all the critical thinking skills needed to be safe and is just the basics of getting around.  Different games on Poisson Rouge let kids practice moving the mouse by popping bubbles or flowers without being under pressure to follow a particular path.  Then there are other games that let them experiment with a click or a click and drag, so as they build their skills they can access more.  A lot of the games use a variety of skills, first using the mouse to clear the screen, then clicking to choose a game, then clicking precisely within the game.  This has encouraged my girls to use it collaboratively, with the little one doing the simple things she can do then handing it over to the big girl.

For little ones not up to that yet, there is a little red box on the bottom right that says ‘PRTV‘ for Poisson Rouge TV.  My little girl adores this and the scientist in me loves it too, I also think some of them are hilarious.  They’re not really TV, but very simple animations.  There are some stories, simple patterns, or the ‘Birds’ series is extremely clever.  I won’t give it away, but definitely check them out.  They are all great to spark questions and conversations.

There’s not really much else useful I can say as a review – it’s good for skills, good for a wide range of interests and abilities, non-commercialised, and extremely well designed.  Forget the children, I can spend hours on there playing.  Basically, don’t waste any more time reading here, get over there and start having a play.

I’ve had a great time checking this one out, I’m always a biologist at heart.  And starfish are really fascinating!

General:

Starfish are echinoderms (e-KY-no-derms) like sea urchins.  There are a lot of different types, like there are different types of mammals.  They all have a central body with their mouth and gut in it, and arms that help them move.  They are predators who catch shellfish to eat.  Many biologists now call them sea stars, and they are closely related to brittle stars.

Moving:

Starfish have hundreds of little feet called tube-feet.  They stick out of their arms and help them move, you can see them clearly in this video.

They can move on land too, have a look at this video.

Eating:

Starfish have two stomachs and they can push their first stomach out through their mouth!  This means they can eat something like a clam by pushing their stomach into it’s shell, rather than trying to get it into their mouth.  It starts to break down the clam then pulls its stomach back in and passes it to the second stomach.  Here is a link for a video of a starfish eating, although you can’t see the stomach.  (In fact there are a lot of fun sea star videos, it’s worth looking at some.)

Growing:

Starfish babies don’t look anything like starfish.  They are very tiny (1mm) and float with the algae as zooplankton.

They actually look more like young animals with backbones because they could be cut in half lengthwise.  When they get a bit bigger they grow lots of tubes they use to catch even tinier animals.  You can see the mouth and stomach in this picture.

Then one side shrinks and the other side starts growing bigger and around, that’s how they start to look like little stars.

There is another way new starfish can grow as well.  If they are chopped up, maybe by a big fish, a storm or even by fishermen, the pieces can grow into new starfish.  All that’s needed is part of the central body joined to the leg and a new starfish will grow, so you might get two or three starfish out of one!

Starfish have another clever trick, if one of their legs is bitten off they can grow it back.

You can see here that the two legs down the bottom are regrowing.

Cool Stuff:

A starfish has been found in England that should only have five legs, but has eight instead! The biologists who have studied it think it might be conjoined (siamese) twins, it’s now in an aquarium.

This is just hilarious!

I’m a sucker for pictures of Earth from space, it’s interesting to see things from such a different perspective and the idea that we have managed to build machines that can hang in the sky and talk to us is fascinating.  Plus they’re gorgeous!

NASA has a lovely site called Earth As Art, which I actually found through this blog here.  The pictures are available in three different sizes, as thumbnails as you browse through, in a medium size with good, relatively simple information about them, then in a high resolution image that is large enough to make a good desktop background for your computer or print onto an A4 page.  A great touch is a little map that lets you know where you are for each photo.  Many of the photos are taken with filters to answer particular questions, and come in stunning colours.

For littlies they are something to look at, especially if you have a nice printer.  For very little ones they are probably too abstract, but for a 3 or 4 year old it is something a bit different to be able to say – this is what a mountain or river looks like from the top.  The perspective from above can also be used as an introduction to drawing your own simple maps of your garden or house.

For school age children they are brilliant to encourage all sorts of questions:

• What are air and water currents really like?

This is a demonstration of wind, showing what happens when air currents go over an obstacle such as an island.

These beautiful patterns are caused by ocean currents affecting where sea grasses grow.

• What can earth tell us about the past?  Or about space?

Australia’s oldest impact crater, 1.7 billion years old.

• How do land and oceans interact?

Sediment from the Ganges flowing into the Bay of Bengal.

• What is the human impact on earth?

The impact of logging and mining on the rainforest.

As a contrast, these are windbreaks of densely planted trees in fairly inhospitable country.

The purple on the lower left is the second largest city in France.

• And how does the earth impact on humans?

The desert is encroaching – red is healthy vegetation.  The tiny red dot in the middle is an irrigated plot, with a lone farmer continuing to work the land.

This may sound weird, but Google Image Search is a really cool thing you can do on the computer with little ones.  I’ve often spent time with a pre-schooler on the chair next to me and a baby on my lap looking at the pictures.  It’s a bit like a choose your own adventure novel, you start with the word you’re searching for, but who knows what site you’ll end up on and where you’ll go.  Unfortunately that is the down side, you really do need to be with them when letting them loose, or have some sort of protective software.  I once ended up on a white supremacist site while looking for photos of planets.  Nothing nasty and nothing the kids would have understood anyway, but a bit of a shock!

Fun things to do:

• Obviously – search for whatever your kids are interested in!  Baby dragons, ponies, pandas and fairies are all things we’ve searched for.



• Help little ones write words for themselves.  My daughter is 3 and has pretty good letter recognition for the ones she commonly uses.  She can type many things spelled out to her.
• Challenge their stereotypes.  We all have certain pictures in our heads of particular things.  A search gives you many different images and can make you think about things differently.
• Use the pictures to illustrate your own stories.  Save them and print them onto paper, then your kids can either write or type their own story or tell you what to write for them.  Self-made books are brilliant for pre-reading and early readers, in fact they’re great for any age.

  

• I know I go on about themed play, but it makes your life so much easier.  And for kids at school you will find they have a theme, so for someone who is reluctant to get into their homework a look through the pictures may spark an interest or give them an idea.  Pretty much any website that has information at a level appropriate for kids will have images, so an image search is another way to get them to find things, rather than a boring Google search where most of the sites are above their heads.
• Let school kids use them to illustrate their work.  I can’t draw and used to hate that aspect of homework, a few images back then would have made my life much more pleasant.  If they are finding, choosing, resizing, placing and printing the images, aren’t they learning at least as much as if they draw them for themselves? (But don’t try this for an art class.)
• Use them to explain things in a way little kids can understand.  I’m currently trying to teach my almost 4 year old to pay attention to other people’s feelings – when your little sister is yelling and crying, stop!  We’ve looked at happy faces, sad faces and angry faces (and made them ourselves!) to try to help her awareness and teach her what to look for.  I strongly believe it is important to give our kids as wide a range of emotional cues as we can – kids experience the emotions they can describe, they need lots of options.

  

  

  

What other uses could you find for Image Search?

*This is ironic, but the images here don’t come from Google Image Search.  They come from a site I use called Dreamstime with high quality copyright-free images.  For your kids at home you can use pretty much anything you find, but if you are publishing the pictures, even on the internet, make sure they don’t belong to someone else.

It’s getting warm and time to get out in the garden again.  I have to admit I have a black thumb – I can kill any plant – but this website looks like so much fun it has me all enthusiastic to try again (or at least give my husband suggestions ).

It’s a very simple site, there are three sections - Make Things, Grow Things and Watch and Learn Things.  Each then has a list of links that takes you to the different activities.  Because the site is linked to an online gardening magazine there are new things added every month.  And because it is Australian most of the activities are suitable, although they may need a bit of tweaking depending on where you live.

There are a huge range of things to make at different skill levels, from making your own barometer to simple daisy chains and drying flowers.

All the growing things are more interesting than just ‘this is a good thing to plant.’ There are some that can be done inside, such as bulbs in bottles or growing pea sprouts, or more elaborate projects like a maize maze.  I want to try this one – we grew corn last year so I know it works here and we have a big empty patch at the moment.

The Watch and Learn Things have a range of interesting suggestions, from testing your soil to watching butterflies and lots of information that big kids can read or parents can keep up their sleeves.  Kids will probably like GROSS!

If you are at all a gardening person this site will give you and your kids weeks of entertainment, and it’s probably worth signing up to the magazine.  There are fabulous ideas here to get kids of all ages out and doing things.

The NASA site is enormous, I mean really, really big.  It has so many things you could do with kids that to review all of them would produce its own enormous site so I’ll do them bit by bit, starting with the NASA Kids’ Club.  The first thing is to check the top right of the page, there is a little link that says ‘Text Only Site.’  This is the place to go if you have dialup or a slow connection, because the Flash version is, well, flash.  It is too slow and frustrating for most kids if it’s taking a long time to load.

I’m pretty impressed they’ve put a text version in, it’s a courtesy I haven’t seen before.  It’s more exercises than games, great for teachers or homeschoolers.  They have the same names as the Flash games but tend to be maths or English based, not much science or space.  There are still some pictures available, but there is a list of captions and then you click to link to the picture you want, rather than waiting for them all to load.

The Flash version has all sorts of games divided into two sections.  Up the top is a section where you can choose a level to get different games.  This is not designed for littlies, most of level 1 my 3 year old can do but she can’t navigate around or read the information.  Some of it could be used with supervision, but a lot of it needs a level of precision they have to practice to get and the instructions are not intuitive (translation – even I had trouble working out what you were meant to do for some of them).  For school kids they could be good to make them think rather than just point and shoot.

Most of the games at the bottom are your garden variety matching, shoot at things or jigsaws, but there is information about the space programme included.  So for example when you match two cards they give you a factoid before disappearing.  So from that point of view they are designed for older kids, especially ones who are already interested in space, but my 3 year old is quite capable of ignoring all the writing and just playing. 

Throughout there is a great attempt to make the space programme real – snippets about people actually on the space station, pictures of haircuts in space, lots of photos of the vehicles and robots. Putting my teacher hat on for a moment I have to say it is mainly thematic, rather than conceptual.  This means there is a lot of things that could be done any way and just happen to use rockets, for example counting Mars Rovers rather than basketballs.   There is a little bit that tries to get kids to think about the reality of space exploration - such as what would we pack on a rocket? – but I would say it is a site that uses space rather than being about space.  If your kids are interested in space that is a tremendous hook, and this site could give them some information to intrigue them, plus there are some really cool photos.  It would also be a good starting point for research projects.

For older kids who already know a little bit about space this site has a wide variety of activities they can try.

There are a lot of really good websites out there attached to real life attractions, and many of them are very high quality and useful.  I’m just reviewing one here, The Aquarium of WA, but there are guaranteed to be some that are local to you or cater to your child’s interests.  I chose AQWA because we’ve just been there and really enjoyed it!

The site is very professional and easy to negotiate.  On the front page is a link for the extremely cool Virtual Tour.  This is not a video, but a 360 degree still photo that you can move around in.  It automatically circles, but you can also click and drag to look at specific things and zoom in and out.  I certainly get a kick out of moving it around, and it’s something little kids can do as soon as they can control the mouse. 

The purpose of the site is to entice you to go, so it’s not overloaded with information.  But there’s some things that will interest kids in the FAQs and some really beautiful fact sheets on things like leafy sea dragons.  They are well worth printing if you have a good quality printer, and the information is at a good general primary school level that can be interpreted for younger kids.

The other section that’s definitely worth a visit is the Education tab.  The Curriculum links are aimed at excursions, but there are some excellent ideas there for parents or homeschoolers that could be adapted to a more general ocean theme.  Even better, they refer to specific worksheets that are available as PDFs.  While I wouldn’t suggest using them as they are at home, there are some that can be easily modified and done with children of all ages. 

 This site is well worth a visit, and so is AQWA itself.  Even within it’s limits as a teaser it has stunning photographs and interesting facts that are at the right level to be accessible and interest kids (and adults).  Add in some of the printable ideas and it’s a great place to start to learn more about oceans, especially if you happen to live in WA. 

Other Sites

A few suggestions. I haven’t reviewed these, but may at a later date.  If anyone has any to add to the list or comments on the sites, just leave a comment!

• Sydney Powerhouse Museum
• Werribee Open Range Zoo
• San Diego Zoo
• South Australian Museum
• Anglo-Australian Observatory

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This might be a bit controversial, I’m sure there will be people who dislike the idea of small kids and computer games.  My reasoning is that computers are here to stay.  They are going to be the main way our children communicate – this is how they will get information and how they will work.  So to me teaching them about computers is like teaching them about books and pens.

Obviously I’m not advocating letting them loose – do you really think it’s a good idea to entrust a toddler with a machine worth thousands of dollars?  But I do think computer games under supervision and in small doses are a great way of playing with older babies and toddlers, and are good for their language and fine motor skills.  We started with my daughter sitting on my lap or on the desk.  She would point at the screen where she wanted me to click.  Then she started using a mouse on her own, either she would move it and I would click, or I would line it up for her to click.  Then she started doing it all for herself.  At 3 she’s fully proficient with the mouse, can find her own icons of the things she’s allowed to use, and adores typing and computer drawing using programs like Paint.  She can type her own name and with help her sister, Mummy, Daddy, Granny and Poppy.  We have not tried to teach her any of this, she has wanted to do it all.  It’s probably as much a comment on how much time her parents spend on the computer as anything else.

You don’t need the internet, we’ve also had a lot of fun with very basic text editors and drawing programs, but there are lots of game sites out there.  These are just some we have experienced.

Fisher Price Online Learning Games - Obviously a commercial site, but I’ve found the games to be surprisingly good.  They use their characters, but if your child doesn’t recognise them, there’s no hard sell.  I’m not that fond of the infant games – put it this way, letting a baby hit the keyboard is a recipe for needing a new keyboard, or even a new laptop.  However if you have an old keyboard you can plug in for them then let them bash away.  They’re basically the same as a jack-in-the-box – hit the button and something pops up. 

The toddler games I quite like, there is a bit of a variety.  I do find the language in some of them is too advanced and think they’re aimed at 3 or 4 year olds, but my daughter was happy to click on them even when she didn’t understand.  And the repetition and form of the language is pretty good – asking the same question over and over.  They also have stories you can personalise, another way to read with your child.  And they are good pictures that you can talk about as well as use the text.  Another great thing is the number of different print outs they have.  You can print enough colouring in sheets to last you until school if you really want. 

Kiddies Games - Not as slick as the big sites but there are some endearing games here.  I found some of the accents a bit hard, but there are simple games for simple concepts such as body parts, colours and left and right.  Another good feature is that they work through both keyboard and mouse, so they can be used for ‘let’s have a bash’ or for real attempts to answer.  And if you wait they give you the answer, so there is always interaction.  Plus some of them don’t correct – if you were supposed to click red but click orange it doesn’t say you’re wrong, it just says ‘Now the baby is dressed in orange.’  These were a big hit with us.

ABC Kids - The ABC is the Australian national broadcaster.  Personally I find the site a bit confusing, but that may be because I’m not a kid.  My daughter finds all sorts of things here.  I’ve found clicking on The Playground (the box type thing) is the least frustrating – you know there will be online games there.  If you go to the Games and Activities section some of them only have print outs, which doesn’t go down well with a 2 year old who wants to play.  There are a variety of games, using matching, colouring and imagination, plus stories to watch.  I think this site is really well done, the controls are really kid friendly so once they can use the mouse they can be quite independent – there’s nothing worse than having to have Mum take over and navigate. 

There is also a feature called “Playground Radio” where they (or parents!) can set their own playlists of pretty good songs.  This does need a good connection, but there is a downloadable version as well.

And of course there are the commercial sites.  Search for just about any TV show or toys aimed at kids and there will be online games.  They vary in quality, but we’ve had fun searching for all sorts of things. 

As I said, I think it is important to help our kids learn about computers, with supervision.  The same way we help them draw, glue, paint and read, it’s another indoor activity to add to your toolkit.  Do you have some good sites to add to the list?  What are your thoughts on computers and small children?

The Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia’s national science research facility.  The have partnerships and work in agriculture, mining, environmental and health sciences among others.  The home page is quite clear with different sections easy to find.  Overall the site is easy to navigate, it has small pages with lots of links so you don’t have to wade through things looking for what you are after. 

Parents might be interested in the Healthy Weight and Wellbeing for Children section, it has guidelines based on evidence and practical advice like serve sizes, cooking and shopping tips and suggested meals.  There are also lots of external links on eating and exercise.

From the homepage there is a Kids & Teachers section.  CSIRO offers lots of resources for teachers and homeschoolers including school visits, education centres, and a couple of science clubs for kids of different ages.  There is also do-it-yourself science, quick experiments that can be done at home.  They are divided by subject area and there are games and links sections.

Even better, they have a free weekly Science by Email service.  I have to admit to nostalgia here, I received it for many years and it is what gave me the inspiration for this site.  It is aimed mainly at parents and teachers and the activities can be used for students in both primary and secondary school. 

I love this site.  CSIRO is a great science organisation and they have put a lot of effort into making science accessible and attractive to parents and kids.