Children’s English Site Review: Kindersite
What’s Kindersite?
Kindersite is a directory of online English and Spanish games, stories, and songs for children aged two and up.
The resources that they feature appear in a frame through Kindersite. Better-known publishers include the BBC, Harper Collins, and PBS Kids.
What Kindersite Does Well
Kindersite gives children a safe way of finding online games, stories, and songs across a number of different sites. The directory covers a large selection of the best online games, stories, and songs.
What Needs Work
Finding the games, stories, and songs from the homepage is a little difficult. The link to the games, stories, and songs is called “Directory” which, although technically accurate, isn’t obvious. Something like “Games, Stories, and Songs” would save users from fumbling around to find the main content.
Since Kindersite shows content from other sites, when the content gets taken down on the publisher’s site, the links from Kindersite to the publisher’s site aren’t always updated or removed.
Kindersite members can create their own lists of resources. This has a lot of potential for classroom settings where the teacher can choose resources related to the classroom studies. The only drawback is that, presently, there is only a single log in for each member. Students using the teacher’s password get full access and can make changes to the list. The ability to assign limited privileges to student log ins would make the site even more useful.
How to Use Kindersite
The first time you visit the site with your child, take him directly to the directory page and bookmark it: the homepage is for parents and teachers.
There are separate pages listing games, stories, and songs and each has a large link at the top of the page making it easy for a child to navigate on their own.
Each game, story, and song has an accompanying picture that will probably catch your child’s attention, but keep an eye on the “Age” column—you don’t want a child who is using the site for the first time to get turned off of the site because their first experience was negative.
After trying a few activities, most children should be able to navigate the Kindersite directory on their own.
The Verdict
Kindersite gives children a safe way of finding English and Spanish resources spread across many different sites on their own.