Interesting websites for young children

Aside from the usual Cbeebies and Starfall, here are some other websites that we can explore together with our children.

http://www.letzhop.com/
Using the tagline Edutainment and E-learning Portal for Preschool Children, this website is developed locally. It’s meant to be a pay-by-month subscription model, if I’m not mistaken, but because they just launched, it’s still free to register.

http://www.epals.com/
This website is a global community where parents and teachers can find e-pals for their kids. I remember having pen-pals when I was little and it was quite exciting. And today, with advanced communications technology, it’s much more convenient to have e-pals. I first heard of this website from Coachsha. She said we don’t have to wait till our kids can read and write to be able to participate, we can read and write on their behalf first.

http://www.smories.com/
Smories are free original stories (in video format) for kids, read by kids. I haven’t tried this, but it’s an interesting idea (and the kids are cute!). I hope my kids will have the confidence to do this kind of story-telling later. One thing I think we Asians sometimes lack is the confidence to speak out and articulate ourselves. I know I’m like that, and to a certain extent, still is.

http://www.sharing-books.com/
This website house 269 ebooks of children stories. We can download for free, but we are encouraged to make a donation. One third goes to the author, one third to the organizing company (who manages the website etc), and another third goes to an NGO called Room To Read.

A bit of a sidetrack, here's a bit more on this NGO.

Taken from their website: Room to Read believes that World Change Starts with Educated Children. We envision a world in which all children can pursue a quality education that enables them to reach their full potential and contribute to their community and the world.

In the ebook What Matters Now, Room To Read's founder John Wood wrote:

Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further.

If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.

Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow.

Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins. Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty. In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.”

That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school. And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women.

I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that. A world with thousands of new schools. Tens of thousands of new libraries. Each with equal access for all children.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
The second best time is now.

Do you know of other interesting websites? Do share with us :)