Good educational web sites for young kids to play on?

You could try the CBeebies website from the BBC in the UK. Some of their content is more educational that other bits, but all good fun!

www.starfall.com is an excellent site for teaching kids early reading skills. My 4 year old has been using it independently since she was 3 and loves it.

PBSkids.org is a bright, colorful and simple site with coloring, educational games, and other activities.

I would recommend www.uptoten.com and www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies for ages 3 through to 10

For creative and artistic activities I recommend www.mrpicassohead.com ( It is great fun to do stuff together as well)

My daughter likes the Up to Ten site because the games and exercises are so varied and at times funny. The site layout is good as you are able to instantly see which games are recommended for which ages groups.

National Geographic Kids has lots of fun facts and videos about animals and the natural world.

Here are a few sites that my kids enjoy. Some are for the kids others are for the parents to get educational resources:

www.starfall.com - already mentioned but it's really good. www.educationcreation.com - good for printable letter worksheets. www.spellingcity.com - Teaches children to spell. Uses standard Dolch site-word lists.

I like the above sites because they aren't to commercialized.

My 5yo loves http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ and has been playing there for a year or so. I love it because it is beautiful, artistic, and contains NO ADS! Yes, you read that right. Lovely music, beautiful graphics, and ad-free. Enjoy!

All three of my daughters love the Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony sites (I can only post one link but you should be able to find it from a Google search). They're not particularly educational, but they have learned tremendous hand-eye coordination from moving the mouse in order to color posters, play games to get points, and buying things in the virtual world.

Personally, I think this is sufficient reason alone to let them play. I don't know that they'd have as good of a time on a more traditionally educational site. (We educated them at those ages through other means.)

I'm heavily involved in the TreehouseTV site - the site itself is broken into two parts - games for the kids and articles for parents. Some of the games on the site can teach basic skills - basically in the flip-and-match type of format but they aren't really educational on the whole - still well worth trying out.

Aside from sites already mentioned (e.g., www.treehousetv.com) I also use www.fisherprice.com - which has infant/toddler/and preschool games. My 2-year-old can press any button on the keyboard to review his alphabet and see and hear animals associated with that letter. He can also press any button to count as he scores in various sports. My 4 1/2 year old also finds several activities that she likes. Another site that I like is www.jumpstart.com. It emails you the achievements that your child has attained, allows them to create and recreate their own character to move from activity to activity and, although I've used the free membership so far, you can get a full membership with full features. My 4 1/2 year old loves it and, although I made a login for my 2-year-old, I haven't really reviewed it yet for games suitible to his age.