Search Engine For The Children
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 13, 2002
millenniumkids.com.au/index.2.htm/
Millennium Kids is a kind of colourful Greenpeace for kids; its brightly coloured, cartoon-like site covers both its online (teacher info packs, e-mail contacts) and offline activities (special projects, environmental conferences.)
The group is Western Australian based, but offers links to children's environmental sites all over the world.
It's all pretty accessible, tackling issues such as overuse of plastics, native planting, bees and understanding conditions in other countries.
The site is aimed at children aged 10 and upwards.
theartgallery.com.au/KidsArt.html
Sticking your child's (amazingly advanced) daubings up on the fridge or or your wall at work is so passe now that you can post them on the Internet. The Kid's Art Gallery allows children to send their scanned works in to be displayed alongside other young Renoirs; and when they've done that, they can read short and well-illustrated pages about the real Renoir or Cezanne. The list of artists and styles is limited, but there are links to kid-friendly art sites for further reading.
wicked4kids.com.au
The online equivalent of the old-fashioned activity book, Wicked4Kids roams across predictably corny jokes, fun things to make out of scrap paper, brain-teasers and printable puzzles.
There are chat areas where children can discuss the issues of the day, such as Harry Potter and how their cruel schoolteachers won't let them study the Faraway Tree books in class.
Grownups might like to take a look at Wicked's suggestions for keeping kids safe on the Internet, too.
thewiggles.com.au
Proving you're never too young to go online, The Wiggles' official site is a cacophony of flashing images, spotty dinosaurs, grinning blokes in coloured skivvies and chances to add to the Wiggles fortune that small persons will love.
Current TV and live performance details and important snippets like the Wiggles' birthdays are listed on this engaging site.
And when the TV goes on the blink and you're desperate for a Wiggly moment, this site has music samples from Wiggles CDs.
It seems to load a tad slowly, but not as slowly as a queue at a Wiggles concert moves.
© 2002 The Sunday Age