Children don’t have the kind of maturity level, ability to comprehend, let alone, the attention span to appreciate these forms of media and garner any type of useful knowledge. That’s where their website, Meet The Minimops comes into the picture. National Geographic has found a way to engage the young child demographic: By creating a website that consists of a medley of interactive, stimulating, and challenging online games for children to play and learn with.

Meet The Minimops features 5 unique games: A connect the dot game that features various animals or artifacts of scientific or historic nature, a music band game that lets you control each of the band members and even record a song, a game that lets you convert visual effects into music, a garden planting game where the object of the game is to figure out how to make a plant grow, and a dinosaur puzzle game.

Each of the interactive games part of the Meet The Minimops ensemble caters to the themes that are typical of National Geographic. Each one offers the game playing child an opportunity to learn, develop their motor skills, develop their analytical and problem solving skills, and to stimulate his or her creativity.

Online Tangram Games And More is a website that offers a myriad of problem-solving puzzle games for children to play. There are a total of nineteen games currently offered through this website, as of this writing, as a matter of fact: Mahjongg Solitaire, Reversi, Same Game, Backgammon, Sudoku, Mastermind 2, Tangram, Snake, Pairs, Maverick, Gravity, Rush Hour, Tris, Difference, Tower of Hanoi, Set, Mastermind, Eleven High, and Game of Life.

Each of these games, in some fashion, call upon the player to rely upon reasoning, logic, and analytical skills in order to win each game.

Most, if not all of these online games, are based on their traditional offline counterparts. What is unique about the ability to play these games online is that the player has the ability to play against the computer and does not need to worry about setting up an actual physical game board. The player can simply log onto the website and get started playing right away without having to set up any tangible game pieces. Hence there is no clean up.

Plus, the games may be played an unlimited number of times, over and over again, with different variations of each game during each and every single invocation of the game instances.

Today’s youngsters can challenge themselves and test their knowledge of geography right online. Learn Geography is an online geography website that empowers youngsters to master their knowledge and awareness of the world.

The way purposegames.com works is that when you first land at the website, you are presented with a series of different geography challenges. Each challenge varies in the degree of its complexity. Some challenges are very simple, for example, naming the seven continents. And then there are challenges for naming each of the states of the United States, the countries in various continents throughout the world, the capital cities of states, the capital cities of countries. And then there are even more complex challenges for advanced students of geography, such as games that teach you to associate longitudes and latitudes with various nations, localities within various different countries, state abbreviations, identifying what countries lie in between two others, identifying countries ranked by population, identifying the distances between various countries, countries ranked by size, and countless more.

In fact, there are well over thirteen thousand games in total, on this website! That is enough to challenge even the most knowledgeable person about geography.

While this website is designed with children as the target demographic, it is without a doubt, something that even adults can enjoy. Many of these games are all timed quizzes. In other words, you can challenge yourself to see how quickly you can solve each geography quiz. See if you can best your own previous score. Or better yet, pit yourself against your friends or your colleagues to see who can complete a quiz in the fastest amount of time. When you complete a game, you can submit your score online to the quiz’s online leader board, where you can see the top scoring people for this particular competition. Do you have what it takes to make it to the leader board?

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.

Indeed, the Isle of Tune, is every bit as much about city planning as much as it is about learning how to compose musical melodies.  The way it works is that you start by laying down roads. You can create something as simple as a few small streets, or you can create a complex system of roadways that span several city blocks. It’s entirely up to your child’s imagination. And then the next step is to create cars that will traverse these roads. You can create up to 3 cars in this game.

Now, here comes the interesting (and challenging) part:

The next step is to lay down trees, houses, lamp posts, trees, and shrubs alongside the road. But these are not just there to add scenery. Each of these roadside additions is a fully configurable and customizable musical instrument that is played every time one of the three cars drives by it. Each instrument is customizable in terms of volume, pitch and tone, type of tone, how many beats to play or skip of the tone.

And once you lay everything out, it’s time to animate your city by playing the “Go” button. Your cars will automatically start driving up and down the roads. (You can even define one-way intersections or roads to keep the cars driving in a specific pattern). As they pass by each roadside object you created, that particular tone will be played.

Beginners will get a kick out of being able to create music with Isle of Tune. More advanced players will be able to compose entire melodies. The site even comes with some sample designs that were created to play some popular and familiar songs. And you can always save your creations to come back and play later. Or you can share them with others.

The premise of Mini-Mizer is really quite simple: You start with a basic Lego figure. And then your child can customize this figure across a myriad of different dimensions: Your child can customize the avatar’s facial expression, hair style and hair color, color and style of shirt and pants, and what type of hat, scarf, and shoes it is wearing, and even whether the character has wings or a tail!

This game encourages youngsters to explore all of the different ways people in the real world look and how they dress. It empowers them to take creative control over creating their own characters, using completely interchangeable parts. For instance, with the simple click of a mouse button, the avatar might switch from brown hair to blond hair, or from wearing blue jeans to a red skirt. Youngsters can even pick different objects for the avatar to hold in its hand, and you even get to pick which hand the object is being held in.

Games like this one not only challenge your child’s creative intellect, but also encourage the development of your child’s hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, namely that of being able to manipulate the information on the screen by moving the mouse around and clicking on the mouse buttons.

Has your child created a masterpiece that you would simply like to save, or which you would like to use elsewhere online? The Mini-Mizer website even provides instructions on how you can save the avatar that your child has customized.

With hundreds of possible combinations of characteristics to build your avatar from, this will help to stimulate your child’s sense of curiosity and creativity.

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!

From the website: “Once upon a time this was a holiday-ish site created by a rather big-ish ad agency to help raise money for UNICEF. Well, we more than hit our goal of $10 000 and wanted to say thanks by turning the site over to the people”.

A beautiful winter snowflake created at flurrious.com

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.

CW4Kids is the popular name of the 4Kids.tv website created and run by the CW television network. CW4Kids has plenty of games that the kids will love to play, but there are also excellent opportunities for kids to find activities and puzzles that encourage learning.

At CW4Kids, kids can interact with other members at the site in a safe environment. Children are able to challenge each other on each game or even interact with each other on a messaging system that incorporates pre-written messages. This allows kids to choose from a list of messages to send to their friends, but also maintains a safe environment.

CW Kids Games Page

From the main page, kids get to choose from a great variety of games and activities. Available activities include puzzles, arcade style games, word games and much more. The main page features a different “featured game” every day so that there’s always something new to check out. Also, CW features a list of the top five point leaders as motivation for kids to work their way up the ranks.

Games Highlights and Categories

When you scroll down to the bottom of the main page, you’ll discover games organized into different sections. For example, you’ll see a set of spotlight games, featured activities, and also games sorted by the show they’re based on, or the category of the game.

The category section is great for kids that really like certain types of games, like action, puzzles or other game types. Kids can go straight to that section certain that they’ll find something to do that they’ll love to play.

Mechanical Commando

One example of one of the arcade games that are available at the CW Kids Games section includes Mechanical Commando, where kids navigate a tank through various mazes, dodge enemy drones and try to shoot them with different weapons. The quality of most of these games is somewhat average, but they are better than most of the free flash games that you’ll find at other sites.

Chaotic

A great example of some of the strategy games is the game called Chaotic. Chaotic is a modernized version of the original game called Othello, where you must change all game pieces to your own color by enclosing your player’s pieces by yours. The strategy and puzzle pieces offered by CW Games are all well done. They are almost all remade classics with great graphics and cool background music to hold the interest of any child.

Pyramid Stones

Another great example of a great educational game you’ll find at CW Kids is Pyramid Stones. In this game, kids need to hold down the mouse button to size stones and size them appropriately to balance the scale. Each stage gets more complicated as various sized stones get piled onto one side. The name of the game is to match the weight as closely as possible without going over and tipping the scale too far.

Lots of Mazes

Throughout the activity area, you’ll also come across a wide variety of creative mazes that really push the IQ of any child. There are some mazes that test the child’s ability to solve multiple puzzles at once by manipulating the keyboard directional keys to land the solid white square into the hollow one. Such a process of concentrating on several complex goals at once can greatly accelerate the development of advanced problem solving skills.

Kids Can Win Prizes

At CW Kids, there are also lots of educational or just plain fun activities for kids to choose from. One example of such an activity is “papercraft” patterns that kids can use to build paper model figures of their favorite CW figures.

CW Game Challenges

Throughout CW Games, kids can also challenge other players to face off against them in many of the games that are available throughout the website. Both players accumulate points in such challenges, but the winner gets to have the results published under “Recent Challenge Results” in the Challenge section of the website.

Sending Messages

One of the things that is most important to parents is that any website their kids are members at should not allow any sort of messaging system where members can type out private messages to each other. CW Kids alleviates those concerns by providing kids with a messaging system that has prefilled messages for kids to choose from. This prevents private conversations where children could get in trouble, but it still allows kids to send fun messages back and forth.

Rewards Plaza

Kids that play games at CW Kids even have the opportunity to win real prizes. By building up points after playing games or winning challenges, children get to trade in those points for small gifts. While the gifts aren’t extremely expensive (in fact, most are only virtual), they do make kids feel as though they’ve made a great accomplishment.

CW Kids is an excellent example of a children’s game site that parents can feel good about letting their kids play. The environment is safe, and the variety of games allow for a little bit of fun mixed in with a little bit of learning and education.

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.

There are a lot of game sites for kids on the Internet, but not all of them come with the backing of the Nickelodeon brand, where you know the content, themes and fun will be age-appropriate and a lot of fun. Kids love Nick, and parents like the fact that Nick produces high quality television content for their kids. The website content from Nick offers the same attention to quality and fun.

Nick Games Main Screen

At Nick Games, there are just so many games that kids will be hard pressed to run out of interesting things to do. Unlike most flash game websites, the quality of these games is superb, and no less than the quality of the shows that the characters and storylines are drawn from.

Nick games offers children a whole range of choices to pass their time online, including adventure and strategy games, role playing games, puzzle games and even card games! The site is also a social network filled with comment areas and forums where kids can offer their own opinions about the games, and even an area for multiplayer games where your kids can play games with other children from around the world.

Nick Game Categories

Expect to find more than just plain vanilla fighting and shooting games on this website. Luckily, the creators of Nick Games took time to think about the sort of things their young audience is interested in. This is why, if you search through the Game Categories section, you’ll find categories like card games, quick-play games and puzzle games. None of these games (with the exception of multiplayer games) require any significant setup or learning curve – kids can basically click on the link and immediately start having fun.

The Action Packed Games

There are some games that really stand out above the rest in terms of quality and the ability to capture the interest of kids. One of those is a game called “Action Packed” where kids get to choose their favorite Nick character to play a high paced (and VERY fun) action arcade game.

Playing Action Packed

Once in the game, the child must enter into a duel with the other computer, launching pineapples or other funny objects at the villain. It is a turn-based action game reminiscent of the classic turn-based cannon games from the Atari days. Nick added a special spin and of course a touch of Nick style with a fun backdrop, enthralling background music, and a very easy control system where you click once to aim, and twice to launch. Just make sure to hit the villain before he hits you!

The Game Builder

Another area where Nick went above and beyond simple game play is developing a fascinating application called “Game Builder” where kids can actually generate the background, characters and action for their very own game creation. New creations even get shared on the site so that other kids can try it out. The Game Builder is a great way to spark a child’s creativity and give them a head start into the world of computer programming.

The Cartoon Builder

Similar to the Game Builder, kids can explore another side of their creativity with the “Cartoon Creator”, where they choose the appearance and behavior of their very own cartoon character. Kids really love making up stories, and the cartoon creator allows children the freedom to generate their very own. An account is required to use this part of the site, so parents must give permission and allow children to log into the site to finish their cartoon.

The Brain Surge Quiz

Throughout the Nick game site, kids will come across content that’s drawn directly from some of their favorite shows. For example, in the puzzles and quizzes area, they can play the Brain Surge Quiz, which is based off of the popular show Brain Surge. The online quiz actually features real video taken from the show itself. Kids can try to answer the questions and see how smart they are!

Playing Cards

If arcade games, puzzles or creating games or cartoons don’t interest your child, then introduce them to the Card Games area, where they can play games like “Skipper Skidoo.” This particular game is similar to the popular “Skip-Bo” card game. Children will feel like they’re playing cards with their best friends – only in this case their best friends are the Penguins of Madagascar!

Nick Racer Games

On Nick Games, even the racing games are infused with a bit of Nick flavor. For example, in “Tori’s Race Way,” the child can select which character they want to drive their race car, before entering the track and battling for first place. The animated characters really look a lot like their real live TV counterparts, which of course young fans of these shows will love.

Multiplayer Games

One of the most unique game playing environments are multiplayer games. Unlike other games where children battle against computer-based opponents, in multiplayer games, children actually have an opportunity to play games either against or teamed up with other children from around the world. As any child knows, any game is a lot more fun when you have someone else to play it with.

Overall, Nick Games is one of those sites that is obviously designed by highly professional programmers and constantly updated with fresh content. Most children that start playing online at Nick Games usually return, because the games are well made and fun to play, and there’s always something new to do.

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

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

From the website: Google’s SafeSearch™ screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and deletes them from your child’s search results. Google’s filter uses advanced technology to check keywords, phrases, and URLs. No filter is 100 percent accurate, but SafeSearch™ should eliminate most inappropriate material.


Kidsrex.org – Safe Search for Kids, by Kids.

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 games on the site are: A Winter’s Tale, Radish Picking, Find Peter, Puppet Show (where you can create a customized puppet show for your kids) and Vegetable Picking Game.

Welcome to the world of Peter Rabbit!

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.

Just like in real life, there is no undo or erase function in this drawing application! The resulting image can be printed on your printer, however.

In Train Driver, you help finish a Duplo railway system. The Fire Station game lets you learn to be a fire station operator. In Family Helper, you help a family complete all their tasks before the sun sets. You can also visit a supermarket in 1-2-3 Supermarket, or play a simple Animal Bingo Game.

Playing the Duplo Train Game

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

To clear your music and start from scratch, just press the space bar.

Many people have published their best Tone Matrix generated tunes on Youtube. Just do a search for tonematrix on YouTube to find them!

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.

Don’t forget to check out all the other free online kid’s activites on thie site. There are , for example, many creative building activities such as Build a Robot, Make a Face or Make a Snowman, as well as several connect-the-dots games.

To hear the horses sing acapella, just click on the horses’ heads one by one. A fun game for both kids and grown-ups!

Click here to hear the cartoon animals sing.

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.

The basic membership on Stardoll.com is free, but you will need to pay a monthly membership fee to use some of the advanced features such as selling clothes on StarBazaar or designing your own clothes. Superstars will also get a daily allowance of StarDollars.

You can also earn more StarDollars by playing games. The Globetrotter game, for example, will teach you about world geography.

Stardoll.com also has a large number of celebrity paperdoll dressup games, and new celebrities are added each week.

A Stardoll paperdoll looking through her wardrobe

Playing the Globetrotter game to earn StarDollars.

Most of the content is not free however. Most games and videos cost 0.99, 1.99 or 2.99 USD. Books are typically a bit more expensive, with prices ranging between 2.99 and 5.99 USD. All activities on Kidthing are, of course, ad free, and they all appear to be of high quality.

Much of the content is created by leading content creators. You can find well-known names such as Dr Seuss, Garfield and Guinness World Records in the store. At the time of writing (July 2009), Kidthing is still in beta and runs under Windows. A Mac OS version will soon be available.

You can read a review of Kidsthing on the site Crazy Kids Chicago.

Browsing the Kidthing virtual store.

Reading a digital alphabet book on Kidthing.

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.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to link to or bookmark any specific game on friv.com, which makes the site a bit difficult to use. Still, there are lots of great, free online games in there!

Playing a free, fast-paced Sonic platform game online on friv.com

There are many breeds of cats and dogs to choose from in this game: Siamese, Persian, Poodle, Golden Retriever, Dalmatian, Rottweiler and many more.

The site also has an active pet forum where you can chat about your virtual pets, or perhaps even about your real pets.

Some adoptable animals on the site Foopets.com

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.

Start by building your ordinary self, choosing gender, hair color, eyes, mouth etc so that you get a picture that looks just like you. Then take your pick from the wild parts – perhaps you would like elephant ears, or frog arms? Or a crocodile tail?

Then choose a background for your avatar – a forest or the sea, perhaps? Finally, you can email your masterpiece to a friend, or use it as a desktop wallpaper.

Bat wings, antelope ears and tiger arms. Build Your Wild Self is presented by New York Zoos and Aquarium.

Under Advanced options, you can choose the number of pieces in the puzzle you create, and the shape of the puzzle pieces. You can choose between 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 and 120 pieces. When you have created your own puzzle, you can link to it from your own web page for everyone to play.

This applet requires the latest version of Java, so you might have to upgrade your Java installation to use it.

Click here to solve the Moose image puzzle.

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.

This website is good for toddlers since it is extremely easy to use – just bang the keyboard to create the mess! When you are finished, you can embed the mess on your blog, or email it to a friend.

Harry Hubble helps you clean up the mess on messmaker.com. You can read a nice illustrated storybook about him on the website, as well.

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.

A basic membership is free, but you can upgrade to a paid account for $5.95 per month, giving you access to more exclusive items, games and events.

Each player has an igloo to live in, and can purchase a larger igloo using virtual coins. Penguins can also adopt a number of pets, also called puffles. There are eight different breeds of puffles with distinct personalities.  Members can also play mini games to earn money, or act out plays.

Read more about Club Penguin on Wikipedia

A town in the Club Penguin virtual world.

Jacksonpollock.org was created in Adobe Flash by Milos Manetas.  It is also available for the iPhone.

Fun doodles at jacksonpollock.org.

The games are accompanied by soothing classical music, making them a relaxing kind of time wasters.

Playing the monkeyslide game at Orisinal.com

A jumping rabbit in the Winterbells game at Orisinal.com: Morning Sunshine.

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!

Just like in real life, there are races, competitions and prizes to be won. You can also breed your own horses, and manage an equestrian center.

To play this horse simulation game, visit www.howrse.com .

A young stallion at howrse.com.

The collection of minigames feature a jumping dog, people jumping on armchairs, a man picking apples and more.

A simple point-and-click game at Boobah.com.

Boobah armchair game

Tux Paint is free, open source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Tuxpaint is sponsored by the Tux For Kids project.

Paining a hen in Tuxpaint.

On the website qbesq.com, you will find a Flash arabesque drawing tool that works similar to a computerized spirograph. . Create a beautiful symmetric kaleidoscope-style image, or perhaps a vector based flower, and save it in SVG format or upload it to the Flicker Qbesq group.

Visit qbesq.com and let your kids play with the caleidoscope painter!

Drawing a kalieidoscope image on qbesq.com.

You can find a great roundup of safe search engines for kids here: Safe Kids Search Engines.

Some of the recommended sites are:

Kindernet.com

Quintura for Kids

GoGooligans.com

Ask Kids.com

The best solution is to use web browsers designed especially for children that only display pre-approved content. A great roundup of the best kids-friendly free browsers to download can be found here: Free Internet Browsers for Kids.

Some of the most widely used browsers are:

Kidoz.net
KidZui.com
KidRocket.org

The members that color the most pages will be displayed on the site’s Top Members list, and the finished paintings can be saved to a personal gallery.

Fish coloring sheet at the thecolor.com website.