subject: Current Status Of Fun Educational Games For Preschool Kids Online by:Mike Smith [print this page] We did an extensive search in trying to find something healthy, informative, and equally fun for preschool, kindergarten and first grade kids to do online for a limited amount of time on a daily basis. Let us look at what parents want for their preschool and kindergarten kids and what they actually get.
What do parents actually want?
Parents generally want their kids to get used to computers at a young age, but not get addicted to the same. Hence the "limited amount of time" is a key requirement to any young children's website.
Parents also expect that the website should be generally healthy and suitable for kids. The website should teach the kids the essential concepts of early child-hood curriculum, such as, numbers, alphabets, analytics etc. It is a huge plus, if the kids are taught in a subtle and entertaining manner, without giving them a burdened feeling that they need to learn. Such a fun learning approach, goes a great length in addressing their generally short attention spans. In other words, the kids should learn while thoroughly enjoying the time spent on the website. Research has shown, that this is quite an effective way to motivate kids to learn.
In the fast paced world today, most parents are busy with both parents working. In such a scenario, the website needs to be able to engage the young kids without the parents necessarily having to baby sit them along.
The bottom line is that TV engages kids, but a well designed children's website should be able to engage and interact with the kids much more effectively, while providing the necessary learning.
What do parents actually get?
To our surprise, our search showed that not many sites came close to the above expectations. Here are some of the things we found on the web for children, based on our extensive survey.
One thing that our search revealed is that there are several social networking websites for kids. Sensible parents of preschoolers or first graders wouldn't feel comfortable with their kids doing social networking on the internet before doing social networking in the real world.
The search also exposed a huge number of websites offering online educational games, with a lot of ad-hoc content and flash based games. On the flip side, these games were rather unorganized. Looking at such content, one easily comes to the conclusion that parents have to spend a lot of time trying to organize and present the content to their kids, so that the kids would get something meaningful out of it. This means that parents have to baby sit them on a daily basis and put in a lot of a-priori homework on their part.
The other common thing we found was that most of the content, actually do not "teach" any new concepts to the kid. They generally assume that kids know the concepts and proceed directly to "test" them. This puts a lot more burden on the parents to come up with effective ways to teach the required concepts to the kids. This is one of the biggest shortcomings of online educational games for preschool and kindergarten.
If you are a parent and you have the nominal requirements for your kid's early education and fun learning, as outlined above, there are a few websites that meet some or all of these requirements. One such website for online fun games and educational videos, for preschool, kindergarten and first grade kids is Raylit (http://www.raylit.com).
About the author
Mike is passionate and interested about kids' education and development, with a special focus on preschool and kindergarten. His goal is the use of online tools to address the problems and improve the status quo in this space.
