Early Learning/ Early Childhood

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American Sign Language Learning Aid Link goes to the program page. Download the program here. This is the Windows version, there are others. "A set of programs designed to help the beginner ASL student learn ASL. It is composed of two parts: ASLLA-Dictionary and ASLLA-Fingerspeller. ASLLA-Dict allows the student to look up English->ASL sign. ASLLA-Fspell allows the beginner to practice seeing fingerspelling." Thanks to Andy Uehara, who wrote these programs and is deaf, if that matters to you. Cool. A short manual and other info may be found inside the unzipped program folder. Found it on Sourceforge.

BBC Education - Snapdragon - Tell the Time Cute little activity teaches the hours in English and Welsh! Kids can make the hands move.

Bembo's Zoo A nice little site to teach ABCs. Really good animation and sounds!

BooBah from the UK. This site is for preschool folks. Lots of color and sound. Good fine motor skills training, using a mouse. Windows users will need to teach the difference between left and right clicking, though. Educational Freeware has an excellent writeup on them here, with screenshots.

Brain Workshop "What if a simple mental exercise could improve your memory and intelligence? A recent study published in PNAS, an important scientific journal, shows that a particular memory task called Dual N-Back may actually improve working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence. This finding is important because fluid intelligence was previously thought to be unchangeable. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the dual n-back task also enhances focus and attention and may help improve the symptoms of ADHD/ADD. The game involves remembering a sequence of spoken letters and a sequence of positions of a square at the same time. Brain Workshop is a free open-source version of the Dual N-Back mental exercise. Easy download, easy install. Another SourceForge discovery.

Childsplay "is a suite of educational games for young children." 14 games in all. We've used these with 5 - 8 year olds and the games are excellent! Free to you (GNU-GPL licensed) and ready to download and install. Another excellent effort from an independent programmer, courtesy of Sourceforge.

Cookie from Gudlidotcom "Provides Free online learning games, Educational lessons plans, Kids learning games, Free games for kids, Worksheets Etc. Gudli is the best free online games website including many categories like learning games, kids games, math games, puzzle games, science games etc. which are free to use for 'Early childhood Education' and 'pre-school Education' for kids.... Gudli is a unique online experience for kids where they enjoy learning. With our interactive educational games children develop skills in maths, logic, memory, words, creativity and more. Gudli is free, full of fun, easy to use and the ideal learning space for preschoolers to second grade kids." Well, the proof of the pudding and all that: all the activities are colorful, musical, and informative. There are plenty of games and videos, this is a great learning site and will make a fine addition to Good Sites for Kids. Thank you, Neeta Saini, for the email!

Cyberkidz "is an educational platform for boys and girls in the age of 4 till 12 years. By playing the educational games, children will practise subjects they learn in elementary school (PK-5)." The games are sorted by year from age 4 to 12, using a sliding bar. There are dozens of fun, playable games in every curriculum category, with new ones being added. This is an excellent site from the Netherlands.

Dolch Word Lists from Jan Brett. "11 full-sized, printable lists with Jan Brett artwork." Great Jan Brett art, 20 words per page.

Dolch words page from Education Oasis. "Dolch "Basic Sight Words" are the 220 most frequently occurring words in children's books, excluding nouns. Because many of the words do not follow decoding rules, they cannot be sounded out. Thus, they are learned by sight. Dolch sight words comprise 52-75 percent of all words found in children's books." These can be printed out for your use.

Drawing for Children is a great, very cool, free download (Windows only) from the Netherlands. It says "drawing" but it has been used in computer labs for language arts, too! You can enter text and load .bmp files from Windows Paint. "Drawing for Children is a free drawing program for children with many nice options. The best way to learn to use it is simply to use it. There is though a document describing the use of the program. For more information, see the readme file."

Early Learning "This page features early learning websites for young toddlers and pre-schoolers. Fun ways to introduce your toddler to their abc, 123, shapes and colours with great games, downloads and flash cards." Also sites for older children. There are some wonderful things on here, many of which were new to us! Part of allkids, a fine learning & shopping site from the UK.

Early Learning from Learning Planet. Eighteen games cover ABC and 123 order, upper and lowercase matching, early telling time, early money.

Encyclopedia Interactica is part of the incredible Poisson Rouge (Red Fish) site. Here are 35 simple, well made activities for younger kids that track life cycles of frogs and butterflies, simple math, Pythagorean theorem, why aircraft wings lift weight, the orbits of planets, sizes of blue whales and 747s, solar panels, teeth, inner ears, warm and cold ocean currents; oh, there's so much - and all interactive!

Fungooms This is just so great, wonderful things in the spirit of Poisson Rouge and BooBah but definitely its very own realm of wonder. Can't wait to try this out on our favorite small people! Very ingenious and creative! Kudos to Ned Langman for his amazing site! "Welcome to Fungoom Land! Here you will find funny characters, simple games, music, stories and a gentle learning experience for young children. All for free! This site has been designed to be enjoyed on many levels:

Babies accompanied by grown-ups can enjoy the music, bright colours and simple shapes.
Children of pre-school age can have fun learning mouse control and interacting with the funny characters, learning while they laugh.
Older children will also enjoy the humour, and the challenging fun of discovering and collecting all the stars.
Grown-ups have even said that they've enjoyed playing the games to relax!"
Looove it!

GCompris Our first app from France! Available in over 40 languages (see their main page for a list). "GCompris is an educational software suite comprising of numerous activities for children aged 2 to 10...Currently GCompris offers in excess of 80 activities and more are being developed. GCompris is free software, that means that you can adapt it to your own needs, improve it and, most importantly, share it with children everywhere." Computer discovery, color, sounds, memory, experiential, amusement, reading, mathematics, puzzles,telling time, money, and strategy games like macala. Some of these will really make a child think! Another SourceForge find.

Horazio's freeware  Here is a real potpourri of good free download ed games, by a guy from Venice, Italy named Horazio. Among them is TurboFarm, for 5 - 7 year olds, which is an animal names matching game. There are also some excellent interactive map games to help kids learn the names of states or regions. Examples are Liberty Map to teach the names of US states, another for Greater London, one for Italy, etc. There are also games to learn Japanese characters, vector math plotters, calorie counters, and more. Your choice of English, Italian, and Spanish (one game also has Korean.) "Grazie Horazio"

  Kea Coloring Book  "All the fun. None of the mess!" This free program lets kids color, save and print. It's like a coloring book on your computer. At least 250 more pictures can be downloaded from the site and added to the coloring books. You can download the program at various download sites (the Kea site links to C/NET's Download, which works fine). We used Educational Freeware as a personal preference.

kidsGoflash "Hi, need 30 minutes down time with your tots after running around? Looking for new materials for your kid's early education or home schooling? Want to teach them new words, animals, numbers, shapes, and more? Want to show them what they can do with a computer and the Internet? Take a seat with them, come to kidsGoflash.com, and explore this website with different kinds of interactive early education materials such as audio flashcards, clickable pictures, and learning games."

Learning Planet This is a subscription site, but it has a number of excellent free online ed games. (They have many more activities available if you subscribe.) We especially liked Alphabet Action for pre-K and Kindergarten. The Students page menu is laid out for pre-K and K, 2nd - 4th, and 6th and up grades. Each grade level page has grade-appropriate math, literacy, telling time, counting, matching (1:1),and/or geography games. Make sure to try Rats (pre-K through 6th grade - use the arrow keys.)

Lining Up Strategies to help you get younger kids to behave waiting in a line. If you don't think this is a challenge, you haven't taught Kindergarten! Trust PE teachers to come up with these good ideas. From PE Central.

Literacy Net This is a great interactive site for learning letters, numbers, shapes, and colors! Animated, with sound. Also in German, French, and Spanish!

Minisebran - Freeware For Toddlers. This is from Marianne Wartoft, a very intelligent Swede who has also created the excellent Sebran and Seterra (best geography freeware EVER for kids AND adults!) among others. "Minisebran is a free suite of early learning games for kids 2-6 years old . It includes eight different exercises, including doodle drawing exercises and very simple games to get to know the numbers and letters, and learning to use the keyboard." We've played with it, it's fun! It would be useful for K - 1 as well as some special needs, and good for training fine motor skills.

 Music from Starfall is part of Starfall's literacy site. This section covers some of the main composers, with biographies, and plays some of their music as well.

National Children's Literacy Website "Because Children Need to Read - More than any other single skill, the ability to read - and read well - allows a child to succeed in school, learn about the world, function in society, and someday have decent job options. Enhancing children's literacy is at the heart of the Soho Center's NATIONAL CHILDREN'S LITERACY INFORMATION project - a national children's literacy initiative. The Soho Center is committed to promoting children's literacy in child care settings and home settings. Whether you are a family child care provider, a teacher in a child care center or Head Start program, or a parent of a pre-school or school-age child - there's a lot you can do." This site has quite a lot of good advice, tips, and resources for any child care teacher or home schooling parent. We are very grateful to Jeanna Beker, Director, The Soho Center for emailing us about The Soho Center and its excellent literacy site!

  Owl & Mouse Educational Software Great phonics software that reminds us of the old MECC Apple games of the 1980s. Free software for you to download and install, or play online. Their plug: "Help your child learn with games, software and educational activities from Owl & Mouse Educational Software. Early reading software—phonics software, alphabet games, and Dolch sight words in a fairy tale story. All of it FREE! Free online USA maps, world maps, map of Europe, map puzzles of the US, Europe, Africa, Asia, and many more. You can build your own castle and coat of arms—free downloads."

Phonics from Sadlier-Oxford Educational Publishing. Huge! site. Great online practice games for preshool through grade 6. Covers phonics, sight words, rhyming, vowel and consonant blends, digraphs, beginning and ending consonants, dipthongs, suffixes, contractions, prefixes, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, dictionary use, root words, complete sentences, syllables. All this from one start page that uses popups for each activity - so don't have popups blocked.

Poisson Rouge A delightful hands-on exploration site from France, just one site of many brought to you by Kids Activities from allkids, a fine learning site from the UK. Just all sorts of fun things to click on here.

Rats from Learning Planet Different difficulty levels for pre-K to 6th grade. Covers shapes, letters, vowels & consonant, and parts of speech. Use the arrow keys to move the basket, try to keep under the bird.

Read Alouds section of Good Sites for Kids! has some wonderful read aloud sites for you and your kids! (shameless self-promotion) These are seriously good.

Roxie's ABC Fish is a free computer version of the venerable children's card game. Practice upper and lower case letters, numbers, and a surprise music composition program at the end! Thanks to its publisher, Latticework Software (thanks guys), Roxie is now freeware!

Sebran's ABC - Free Software For Kids "It's never too early for your child to become familiar with letters and numbers. Sebran's ABC's colorful pictures, pleasant music, and gentle games teach letters, numbers, simple math, and rudiments of reading." Free to you under GNU license. Reviews are posted on the site. We've "field tested" Sebran with 5 - 10 year olds. The games are good, they work. Kids like them, too. Thank you to Marianne Wartoft of Uppsala, Sweden, who wrote this fine software! You can fine various good places to download Sebran, just Google Sebran.

Sesame Street Still helping little ones, since the 1960s. Their site has oodles of activities about letters, numbers, coloring, music, eating healthy, and much more. Let kids click and explore! Some activities require Java or Flash.

Sight Words from Quiz-Tree. Realizing that some of our younger kids were memorizing their little easy reader books, we went looking for something online to reinforce their sight word knowledge. Shortly after clicking on this site's pre-primer word list, a teacher commented: "We need this site!" It says the words aloud, too. So, here it is. Part of a larger academic site, and free membership brings lots more goodies.

Signing Savvy THE place to go for ASL! "Signing Savvy is a sign language dictionary containing several thousand high resolution videos of American Sign Language (ASL) signs, fingerspelled words, and other common signs used within the United States and Canada." Watching a video of the signing is way better than looking at a picture with confusing curving arrows. This site will help you learn ASL! Includes search for words and phrases; or browse by letter. Look up fingerspelling, numbers, colors, animals, geography, baby signs, more! Free but limited access for guests. Full membership gives unlimited access to all site resources for $50 a year. Normally Good Sites would not run pay sites, but if you need to learn to sign this is worth it. Thanks Corey and Teri.

Soup Toys You have got to try this it is amazing! "Just about every child likes to play with toys that make noise, balance, topple, float or otherwise interact with the world. Balls bounce, balloons float into the sky and magnets lift metal objects. All of these interactions teach children something the natural world around them. The beauty of Soup Toys is that it isn't confined to a single Window. When you run it, you have access to a virtual "toybox" where you can pull out the desktop toys that you want to play with. The sides of your computer screen act like walls and the floor. You can build block castles, play with toy cars, or have fun with virtual magnets. The possibilities are limitless." This was from the writeup in Educational Freeware .

StarFall Fantastic phonics-intensive site for pre-k through second grade. Stories, movies, and games! Progressive levels let kids read or be read to. Every time we go to this site with K-2 kids, we find something new and great! This site WILL keep those busy little brains going for a whole computer lab session! Thanks, Tia.

Tux Paint Kids really love playing with this program! "Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program. Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative."

Well, here's a start on our Early Learning site!

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