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TopClicks
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Family Fun
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Games & Fun
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For Preschoolers
Ariel's Story Studio Splashin' Fashion - Dress up Ariel the Mermaid, who is happy no matter what you put on her head!
Barney - It's here: a site that celebrates Barney and all his pals! You'll find photos, merchandise, fan page links, audio, games, coloring pages, and more.
Best Coloring Books and Coloring Pages Online - There are two different ways you can color using the Internet. The first is to try an online coloring book. An outline picture appears on the screen, and you use your mouse to select colors and "paint" them in wherever you want. Some of these programs also let you pick the size of your "crayon" so that you can get a finer level of control. Sometimes you can download your completed picture and save it to print out later. More often, though, this isn't possible. If you always want to be able to save your picture, keep reading. The second type of coloring book is a series of traditional coloring pages. Just select the one you want to color, and download it. This saves it to your home computer. You print it out and color it with actual, not virtual, crayons. This Web resource (and the links from it) is a selection of the best and most fun coloring books on the Net.
Billy Bear's Playground - The graphics here are superb! You can play these games online or offline on paper. The Make Your Own Cartoon Bear and the Mix & Match Em Up games are sure to be winners. Billy Bear has storybooks you will enjoy reading.
Boowa and Kwala Games - The games here change from time to time, so you may have to look in the archives to find a flower arranging game, a "Who is wearing my hat?" guessing game, and a fish bone-a-phone xylophone.
Carmine's Introduction to Color - It doesn't matter whether you're picking up crayons for the first time or you're a portrait painting pro, you will find something of interest at this Web page. Explore color mixing and matching activities and learn how the "mood" of a painting changes if you magically switch to different colors. Learn about proportions and portrait techniques. Little children will enjoy Carmine's color wheel game, while bigger ones (and adults, too) will be fascinated with chasing down the evil Dr. Gray and his Dechromatizers!
Charlie Horse Music Pizza - Whether it's the waltz, the tango, or the fugue, it's served at Shari Lewis' Music Pizza Parlor. On the show you can learn about musical instruments, while at this site you'll find coloring pages, games, and project activities. These change from time to time. Recently they had very silly jokes here, such as the following: Shari: Did you know it takes three sheep to make a sweater? Lamb Chop: I didn't know sheep could knit!
Chateau Meddybumps - Read a "story starter" to your child and ask him or her to finish the story; write it all down. Make a whole library of your child's own stories! But that's still not the best part. In the Learning area, click on Online Activities, then have some fun playing games with frogs, fire engines, clowns, and rutabagas.
Children's Storybooks Online - Alphabet Letters - Is your child just learning his or her ABCs? This series of alphabet pages will surely help. Each letter is illustrated with a cute animation. The "B is for Bear" winks and stretches, the "H is for Helicopter" hovers around the computer screen, and the "N is for Nest" hatches out some baby birds. Can you guess what "Z" is for?
Children's Television Workshop Games - Shall we play a game with Bert, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, or--hmm, let's play a game with Elmo! Let's go on a road trip to the farm. Can you help Elmo find the sheep? That was easy, but how about the chicken? If you find all the critters, go back and choose another game. All your favorite Children's Television Workshop friends are waiting for you!
Coloring Site.com - Coloring pages for children of all ages. Cool animated Coloring Pages. Seasonal and Holiday coloring pages and some fun games!
Coloring.com - Did you ever use a computer and the Internet to color? At this site, you can color a birthday cake, a snowman, and other fun pictures on the World Wide Web with your computer. The best thing about this coloring book is that you can color over and over, and the pages don't fall out!
Davis' Farmland - Listen to farm animals, color in their pictures, solve farm word puzzles and mazes, send a friend a virtual postcard and shut the barn door before the horse escapes!
Dress Heidi - Fun for all ages. Dress Heidi Hedgehog or Ricky Raccoon by selecting an item of clothing and dragging it to where it belongs on them.
Funschool.com - Free Interactive, Educational Software - There are over 25 preschool activities: matching games, concentration, ordering, opposites, even animal homes. Sometimes Java games take quite a while to load; this site even gives you something to do during the download process! Play with an online kaleidoscope while you wait.
Gaggle - Gaggle is a fun game that will teach you the special words used for groups of animals. For example, do you know what to call a group of bears? Or a group of larks in flight? By the end of this game you will!
GusTown: Fun, Games, Cartoons, and the CyberBuds! - Meet Gus, Rant, Rave, and the rest of the CyberBuds in this colorful town full of animations, articles, games, recipes, crafts, and links for kids and parents. Head over to the toy store for fun games like Ice Going. Picture a frozen lake with a lot of holes in the ice. Click on one hole--hey, a penguin pops up. Click on another hole--a whale is under that one. Too bad, they don't match. With a splash, both creatures dive back into the holes, and you can try again to make a match. (Hint: Click on the Index link--almost all the way at the bottom--to look at a quick map to all the fun on this site.)
Hop Pop Town - Young children can enhance their imagination by combining sound with pictures. Record a song, experiment with sounds, write a story and have fun.
Idea Box- Early Childhood Education and Activity Resources - Need an idea for a craft, recipe, game, finger play, or online story. Look no further, you'll find all that and more here.
Kid's Domain Downloads - Families who drop in on this site will find it a severe test of the storage capacity of their hard drives. :-) A wealth of kids' software is available on the Internet, and this is the place to look. This extensive, fully annotated collection gives each program its own page, including age recommendations, program sizes, and shareware fees, if any. The page is divided between Mac and PC archives, and another section is devoted to online games.
Kids' Space - This internationally recognized and award-winning site will become one of your favorite Internet destinations because it has something for everyone. Older kids might want to see KSC (Kids' Space Connection) to visit lots of home pages created by other kids--and they can list theirs here, too. Toddlers will love the detour to HPT (Hop Pop Town) to try out the many interactive musical experiences. But Kids' Space itself is everybody's home page. You can submit audio files of your music or digital drawings and hear and see what other children around the world have done, too. The Story Book is where kids write their own stories, using the pictures and themes provided. There is even a beanstalk that keeps growing each month in the Craft Room. Pick an artwork and create a story for it, or choose a story already written and draw a picture for it. All commands at this site include pictures with them, so even the youngest child (who may be still developing reading skills) can enjoy this creative and fun learning experience.
KidsPsych - Can you believe this site offers games for ages one to five and ages six to nine? The very youngest users will have fun sorting shapes, painting an online circus picture, deciding which way to go around a maze, and trying other fun activities. Older kids get to repair a space station with a secret code, sort out mixed-up faces, and play I Spy. There's also a tricky puzzle involving a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain. You have to get them all across the river, but your boat will only hold one at a time. Don't leave the chicken alone with the grain, or the fox alone with the chicken. Can you figure it out? If you can there's a surprise!
Learning Planet Kids Page - Choose a level: pre-K, grades 1-3 or grades 4-6+. In the earliest level, preschoolers can guess what number comes next as they load up train cars, count chickens, and explore an interactive alphabet. Older kids can play geography, fractions, and other games.
Lil' Fingers Storybooks: Animated stories and games for toddlers - The animated stories here contain large text and big buttons for little fingers. In the game area you can build a face, match shapes and draw a picture on the computer. This is a great site for preschoolers.
Little Explorers by Enchanted Learning Software - Try this on very little kids. They can click on any letter in the alphabet and link to lots of Web sites and activities that begin with that letter. This is an interactive picture dictionary, with hours of fun just waiting behind the letters. This page also has English-French, English-German, English-Portuguese, and English-Spanish versions. Much of the site is also available in Japanese.
Minifig Generator - This neat interactive site uses Lego body parts and JavaScript so you can have fun picking heads, torsos, and legs to create your own mini-figure. How about a pirate's head on a doctor's lab coat, with skeleton legs? You can make your own choices or let the computer randomly pick its own. You can then name your creation and build it so that you can print out a copy. Cool, huh?
Mother Goose Pages - Everyone loves these gentle rhymes of childhood. The rhymes are subdivided by subject, including animals, bedtime, folks and things they do, food, places to go, and weather and things around us. An alphabetical listing is available as well as a list of recommended books. The rhymes chosen are favorites of the collector and her children. This is a useful site for finding those elusive words you can't quite remember from a long-forgotten nursery rhyme.
Mother Goose Rebus Rhymes - Enchanted Learning Software - Beginning readers will love this charming site and its rebus retellings of classic nursery rhymes. Pictures replace many of the words so that even very young children can "read" along.
Nick Jr. - Click and drag with Blue's Clues as you try to discover what sinks and what floats (try it yourself in your own pan of water), which snowflakes match, and the identity of the hidden picture in the Race Against Time. Blue has many games here for curious preschoolers. See which ones you like!
Noggin - Noggin is...a TV network. No, it's also a Web site. No, it's...well, maybe YOU can figure it out! And it's from the folks at Nickelodeon and Children's Television Workshop, who put their heads together and came up with the concept of Noggin. There are online places for you to explore (look in Phred's closet for a dress-up game, for example) and some word games in a new language called nogginese. You can also watch some Noggin TV from this site if you have the right plug-in.
Nuttin' But Kids - A living archive of tried and true activities to do with your children. I along with MANY childcare providers have tested the activities out and found them to be entertaining as well as educational.
Otto Club - The California State Automobile Association has a terrific site to help very young kids learn about traffic safety. Visit Otto the car and his interactive town. Talk about street smarts--Otto is a real know-it-all! There is a full-featured animation and sound version or a lighter version for those who believe less is more. Sing along with the Seat Belt Song by pressing the radio buttons on Otto's dashboard. Play the traffic light game, and see if you can compare the two pictures and decide who's stopped for red, based on the signals YOU can see. There are little games on helmet safety and playground safety, too. Be sure to click on the question mark in each area, though, to find out what you can do in each section.
StoryPlace: The Children's Digital Library - A special collection of online stories, games, and activities for preschoolers and early elementary kids, but only the former one was complete when I visited. It's a lot of fun! For example, click on "Monkeys" to hear an online story, try a banana-counting game, make a paper bag puppet, and print out a reading list. Other themes include crocodiles, colors, teddy bears, and more.
The Kidz Page - Kids site with lots of free games, coloring pages, online coloring, free web space, free clipart and more.
Theodore Tugboat Online Activity Centre - Here's a tugboat with a smile and appealing eyes, straight from the TV series. Toddlers will love the interactive story, in which they get to choose what happens next. Downloadable coloring book pages sail via the Net to your printer or graphics program. Little ones can even get their own postcard in the mail from Theodore Tugboat himself!
Thomas the Tank Engine, The Official Site - Do you know Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends? If you're a fan of Shining Time Station, then you'll love the coloring book pictures and information on Thomas and the whole gang. The popular television series is now shooting a movie, to be released in the summer of 2000. New shows are also being produced, and new Really Useful Engines are being introduced on this site. There's a cute matching game in the waiting room area, too.
Time for Teletubbies! - Playground - From over the hills and far away (in the United Kingdom) comes this page about the Teletubbies, chock-full of activities and games for the littlest Web surfers. Can you say bye-bye to the Tubbies? They seem to go away but-hear all those giggles? Oops! They popped back up! Again, again! (There's a secret to make them stay down for good, but we won't tell!)
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