A good website for Kids, for Internet enabled parents

It all started with Google Image Search. It was so easy for me to tell my 3 year old about any animal, any bird, any plant, in fact almost any thing by doing a image search at Google Image Search. As with many things, fad ended after a while. From Google Image Search, we moved to youtube.com since we can pull any music video on demand. My home wireless is good enough to let us watch a song video with not too many buffering-buffering distractions. This carried on for some time and like many things, it also stopped happening. Though we still use youtube, to show her, her own videos and to show her videos to other people.

While all this was happening, we also happened to browse through some of the other sites which plays kids' jingles and poems and have lots of lessons around primary English, Alphabets, Counting etc. Most of these were forgotten as quickly as we have learned about them.

So amid all this, my wife hit on to a site which we have been using till now. I realized this today morning that I have probably been here for last 1 year, I think more. And my 3 year old, loves it. So I thought that it makes sense to share the link with fellow internet-enabled young parents.

This site is called 'Starfall' and is at www.starfall.com. The home page is not really new-age design but very clear and not cluttered with million things. When you choose any lesson, you are taken to a small Adobe Flash based program which is interactive and is much more richer (music, sound, videos, animation etc). I am mostly on Mozilla but I would think that this would work on IE and Safari, on the assumption that Flash programs are pretty much browser agnostic.

I really like the 'Alphabet' section since all the 26 letters are shows in big sizes and when one chooses one of them, you see pictures and sounds of animals/object with that letter. There are also some interesting exercises like 'Make the Match'.

I guess, I would close here. If you do go there and like it then let me know, write a small comment.