A great way to bring the world of encyclopedic knowledge to a child would be to develop a fun, interactive encyclopedia for kids, online. One thing is true about many children, and that is that they are visual and auditory learners. They can create associations between ideas and concepts by seeing, by listening, and by doing, and not necessarily by merely just reading. That is where Encyclopedia Interactica comes into the picture.

The Encyclopedia Interactica is a unique type of online encyclopedia geared specifically toward young children. What makes this online children’s encyclopedia so unique is that there are absolutely no words involved whatsoever! The entire website is based on clickable, interactive pictoral modules. For example, if you want to learn about the solar system, you will see an animated diagram of the solar system, showing the planets revolving around the sun. You also have the ability to click on buttons and sliders on the website to interact with each module, so that you can learn more about each topic, interactively.

Zoombinis Logical Journey is an adventure game for kids that employs the use of mathematics, logic puzzles, and critical thinking skills to help the fictional characters of the game, the Zoombinis, on their quest to outrun the diabolical Bloats who have seized Zoombini Isle, and find a new home.

By setting up the story in this manner, children become engaged in seeking to help fulfill the Zoombini’s quest. For them, it is all about playing a game, challenging themselves, and having fun. They are blissfully unaware that they are actually engaged in any type of “learning”.

This game helps to inculcate practical skills that can be applied in real life, into the mind of the child, such as deductive reasoning, pattern recognition, testing of hypotheses, organization of information, and reasoning of evidence. And this is all while helping to lead the Zoombinis toward their freedom.

The Zoombinis journey follows 4 trails, with a total of 12 different puzzles that beckon the player to solve them. This game is addicting, educational, entertaining, and challenging.

The online game, Chinese For Kids, or School Of Chinese, is an excellent way to help children build up their vocabulary in Mandarin.

Chinese For Kids is an interactive online game that encourages children to learn build up their Chinese vocabulary by means of visual association. When the player first starts up the game, he or she is presented with a castle. The child can then click on the various towers of the castle. Each tower leads to a different room. Each room has a different theme. There are ten towers in all: a kid’s bedroom, a hall, a kitchen, a yard full of animals, a tool shed, a bathroom, an office, an adult’s bedroom, a music room, and a kid’s play room with vehicles.

When the player “enters” one of these rooms, he or she will find various artifacts related to the theme of that room that he or she will be able to click on. And when you click on them, a Chinese voice reads aloud what that object is called, in Chinese. And the spelling of the word in both the Chinese language, as well as the English phonetic spelling are then displayed in a little “chalk board” in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Plus, if the object makes a sound, you can hear the object make the associated sound, such as a musical instrument, a car, or a train.

Chinese For Kids encourages kids to build up their Chinese vocabulary by visual association between the objects they interact with on the screen.

Try Pick Chow! It’s an online interactive game that lets kids create their own plate of food by dragging and dropping food from different foods groups onto a plate, that itself happens to be divided up into 5 different sections, one for each food group.

The object of the game is to fill up your plate with the right combination of foods so that you end up with what is known as a “5 star meal” – or a meal that is well-balanced and healthy, consisting of the right food choices from the “meat and beans” group, the “dairy” group, the “fruit” group, the “vegetable” group, the “grains and starchy veggies” group, and dessert.

A series of meters move up and down, between a red zone (unhealthy) and a green zone (healthy), that represent the quantity of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, fiber, sugar, saturated fat, and sodium on your plate, relative to the recommended portion size for that meal. Your goal is to make sure that each of these meters stays in the green at all times.

This game helps the child put each meal into perspective, by being able to visualize how their plate might actually look if the selected foods were chosen to fill the plate. You even have the option to click on foods and see all of the nutrition information for each, as well as a quick fun fact about the food.

What is fascinating about this game is that while it is aimed at children, even diet-conscious adults, particularly those who are trying to eat healthy and lose weight, can greatly benefit from this tool. If you are planning a healthy meal for yourself but aren’t sure what to eat, you can create a mock-up of your actual meal and gauge for yourself whether you are able to keep each of the meters in the green.

If you are able to successfully create a “5-star meal”, then you are a winner!

You can use Tower Climber and other games on Slumdog.com to practice the following subjects: Ordering numbers, addition, subtraction, doubling, halving, rounding, times, division, square numbers, square roots and much more.

Learning subtraction of negative numbers in the Tower Climber math game.

Check out the full article here:

http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/library/dinosaurs

Dinos are fun and kids love them!

Find the first letter in the word Garfield the cat finds when fishing in the lake.

Play Math Lines on minimalistarcade.com, a banner free arcade.

Math Lines – a math game where you shoot colored marbles.

Buy Rosetta Stone Homeschool Spanish from Amazon.com

Read more about Rosetta Stone on Homeschool Reviews.

Find out where you can buy Rosetta Stone cheap.

A vocabulary activity on Rosetta Stone Homeschool Spanish

The site is completely ad-free. The C and Java source code is available for download, and you can publish the games on your own website if you want to.
Playing a logic puzzle game called Cube on http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/.

There are versions for German Bundesländer, Africa, Brazil, China, European countries France,  Italian regions, Japan, Netherlands and the UK as well.

Statetris is available both online as a Flash game, and as an application for the iPhone.

Trying to hit the correct key combos on the computer keyboard in the Up Beat online game.

Click on the animal letter shapes to view them upclose and hear the sounds they make.

To find the activities on the site, click the button “Library”. Activities include Counting Fish, Treasure Hunt, Visual Numbers, A Day At The Park and more. All games are ad-free, run in full-screen mode and are created in Adobe Flash.

A Day At The Park, a literacy game on the i-board website.

The game Plan It Green was sponsored by National Geographic to celebrate Earth Day (April 22) 2009. A demo version that runs for 60 minutes can be downloaded for free, or you can buy the full version for $6.99. The game is available for both Windows and Mac.

One of the most famous physics games is Fantastic Contraption,where you build a cool contraption using wheels, rods and solar panels. There are many other interesting games on the site as well, such as Crush the Castle, Demolition City, Steer Wheels and many more.

Some other fun physics games are Huje Tower and Magic Pen 2.

To learn more about commercial physics games, visit the blog Fun Motion.

The home page of physicsgames.net.

Fantastic Contraption, Prius Edition

The puzzles section has daily crosswords, codewords, pictopuzzles and more. The games section offers Japanese logic games such as Sudoku, Fillomino, Futoshiki and Hitori, as well as more traditional board games such as Chess, Backgammon, Solitaire, Reversi or Mastermind.

In the Illusions section, you will find virtual objects, visual illusions, shape and size distortion illusions, as well as fractal images and stereograms.

There are plenty of monthly contests on the site to participate in. Brainbashers.com is a goldmine for older kids and teens interested in maths, logic, strategy and riddles.

Playing a very easy Sudoku game for kids on Brainbashers.com.

After Okta hides some bubbles under a shell, he then either adds more bubbles or takes some away. Kids have to determine how many bubbles are still left under the shell.

This free subtraction game is a part of the website Illuminations, which hosts lots of great resources for teaching maths.

The octupus will teach children addition and subtraction.

There are, for example,  several educational variations of the famous Zuma game, where you practice addition and multiplication by shooting stones. You might want to try the very attractive, well designed coffee shop game, where you open your own coffee shop and learn about economy. An old-fashioned variation of the lemonade stand game is available, too, and the popular thinking game Bloxorz.

The free online Coffe Shop Game is a variation of the classic lemonade stand business game. A great way to teach kids economy and entrepreneurship!

A free math multiplication game similar to the marble stone games Zuma and Luxor. The game is called Math Lines: xFactor.

Subjects include: English vocab, chemistry, geography, foreign languages, math and art.

FreeRice is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program.

The site also offers animated animal puzzles, and games where you can build an online habitat for animals, plus lots of educational animal videos. You will also find lesson plans for art and science projects, and educational activities.

An elephant with the head of a zebra and a fish tail.

Globetrotter XL is a fun way to test your geography knowledge. Another great software title to learn world geography is the downloadable Seterra.

Locating an European city in Globetrotter XL.

The “Dollar-A-Glass” game is fast-paced and features great graphics and funky music.

Another free, classic lemonade stand game is lemonadestandgame.com. This game has old-fashioned graphics, but is more educational in that it has many more parameters to set. The best commercial lemonade stand game is probably Lemonade Tycoon. You can download a 60-minute demo of this game for free.

Selling lemonades in the Dollar-A-Glass entrepreneurship game.

Bembo’s  Zoo is also available as a picture book, Bembo’s Zoo: An Animal ABC Book.

A hippo made out of letters at Bembo’s alphabet zoo.

Seterra is very easy to use, and quite addicting! It is used and loved by kids and grown-ups all over the world. It has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Seterra can be downloaded from http://www.seterra.net.

Practising the states in the south and northeast.

Learning the countries of Europe

A Youtube video of a guy finding all the countries in Africa in 47 seconds

In the Poisson Rouge shop, you can support this great site by buying T-shirts, or purchasing the downloadable versions of the games  for Windows or Mac OS X.

The main menu of the Poisson Rouge website. The little castles with flags on them lead to the French, English and Chinese language schools for kids.

Timez Attack is a real, exciting video game where you chase monsters in dungeons. In order to beat the game, children need to solve multiplication problems quickly! The basic version of Timez Attack is free, but if you want more levels, you can upgrade to the full version. The game comes with a full money-back-guarantee.

Timez Attack can be downloaded for free on the website http://www.bigbrainz.com .

A lava scene in the Times Attack game.

On Starfall.com you will meet a number of cute animated characters such as Zac The Rat, Peg The Hen or Gus The Duck. They will guide you through the many activities, including Sight Words and exercises where you learn all about chunking or long vowels vs short vowels.

The animated alphabet has a cute animation or song for each letter in the alphabet.

For kids who already know how to read, Starfall.com offers online animated plays, fiction an nonfiction stories, comics, folk tales, Creek myths and Chinese fables. You can click on each word in the texts and have it read out loud, or listen to it one sentence at a time.

In the Starfall Store , you can order a number of great products such as Starfall Speedway Game, a literacy bord game, Phonics puzzles, motivational stickers and much more.

With its huge selection of great activities, Starfall.com is the number one literacy website on the Internet. Best, of all, it is completely free and does not display any ads!