Children's day: Five fun websites for the young kids

Oh we are a long way away from the Chacha Nehru days this Children’s Day. It’s a fact that today’s digital generation is more in sync with technology than you can ever dream of being. Having said that, it’s not like the controls have completely slipped from your hands! While your child’s learning curve may be challenging yours on a daily basis, with a little help from us you can introduce them to some fabulous World Wide Web experiences that help restore their faith in you as the go-to guru. Trick the kids into believing you know it all by clicking on these cool sites.

Kidzui : Move aside Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Rockmelt and say ‘download’ to kidzui. It’s a web browser especially designed for children with scaled down images of websites, videos, and pictures. Children can browse through categories instead of typing search items and it does not access the open internet since it has 80,000 pre-approved sites that are children-friendly to browse and scour information from. Perfect for children between 3 and 12 years old.

Common Sense Media : If you want to filter out the good, the bad, and the ugly on music, movies, or games that are age appropriate for your child then this is the site for you. It’s an independent forum that helps families choose what’s best for their child based on the ratings given. The parameters that are taken into account include positive message delivered, positive role models, lack of violence, sex, language and drinking, drugs, and smoking. It also has tools like a minimum age rating bar, articles on trends, and a very insightful newsletter.

Doodle Studio : Thanks to 7-year-old Varsha Gupta, Google dedicates Varsha’s doodle to Children’s Day. Varsha, was chosen as winner of the Doodle for Google competition that received 1,55,0000 entries. Ready for your child to be the next Varsha Gupta? Well even if that doesn’t happen, this is a really fun site. Here is where your kid gets hands-on with doodles as part of growing up. The site allows your child to doodle away and even has a submit feature which puts the doodle in the archives for display.

Do-go News : You get access to hundreds of news sites. How about one  for the kids?Well, do-go news, which means young/small in Swahili is just that. With news articles that are short and simple, and including photos/videos the site provides a safe and fun environment for children to read and learn about interesting current events.

Story Something : Taking user interaction and integration to the next level, storysomething generates personalised stories for a child that makes them the hero by making them the protagonist of the narrative. A parent starts off by selecting a theme, and entering interest, topic and age, and feeding the child’s name as the hero’s name. A story is then generated that can be viewed on the web or emailed to a parent. How’s that for innovation?