There are lots of new Valentine's Day printables at Activity Village today. You will find Valentine stationery to use in the home and classroom, a Valentine's Day Concentration Game to print and play, and Valentine's Day coupons to give to friends, family and sweethearts! We have also added a new "How Many Valentine Words" puzzle.
I have just posted a new article on the website - Keeping Kids Safe on the Internet by Michelle Annese. It is well worth a read, especially if your child is old enough for chat rooms.
I have just posted four new Valentine craft ideas on the website. You can find them here.
I don’t often get really excited these days about new discoveries, but tonight my printer is going like crazy and I am saving files to my computer as fast as I can! Here is a really original webpage with some wonderful printable projects which will help your kids learn all about the animals of the world, space exploration, dinosaurs of the cretaceous and Jurassic periods, the farm, and more. Some are also just for fun and are an ideal accompaniment to a visit to the amusement park, aquarium and so on. Definitely worth a look!
We have been working hard on updating Activity Village's Valentine's Day pages. If you visit the Valentine's Day Activity Links page you will find a huge new assortment of crafts, puzzles, printables and more to enjoy. And if you are planning any scrapbooking, card making or other crafts for Valentine's Day please take a look at our new Valentine Scrapbook Paper pack of 16 gorgeous pink designs! There will be new crafts and printables added to the site in the next few days too - keep checking back here to find out when they go up.
This site has some wonderful inspiration for kids who want to draw but can’t quite manage it on their own! The pictures are great – very funny and appealing.
If you have little ones you can hardly do better than visit CBeebies. The site is often updated, all their favourite characters are there, and there is a massive variety to do – games, songs, recipes, crafts, and printables galore. Have a good look round on your own to find lots of help with early education and other parenting issues, and then visit with the kids too to play games or sing along online and enjoy the bright graphics and easy interface. Highly recommended.
Today’s Reality Check – a wonderful story to enjoy and perhaps discuss with your children.
"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."
E.B. White
This is a super selection of colouring pages for toddlers – some with a little bit of learning thrown in too.
We have revamped the family recipe section at Activity Village with the help of Allrecipe.com and are now bringing you a selection of new recipes each and every day!
It is all too easy to get stuck in a rut when feeding the family - and it is hard to find the time or inclination to search for new ideas which fit in with the way we eat. No longer!
Find inspiration for family dinners with 8 recipes a day, or browse the healthy recipe page for 3 new ideas daily. Finally - for all the children out there - we are bringing you 4 new baking recipes each day as well. The recipes will rotate so if you find one you want to try, make sure you save it to your computer or print it out - it may not be there when you come back!
Check out the family recipe section today and who knows what you might be cooking this weekend!
Article by Judy H. Wright
Nothing touches the heartstrings of a parent or teacher more than the plaintive cry “nobody likes me" or ”I don’t have any friends.” We wish there were something we could do to insure the child will be, if not the most popular, at least included in the games on the playground. Actually, there is something we can do to increase their acceptance by the group and become more approachable to others. Read the rest of this article and find more articles of interest at the new "Parenting Articles" section at Activity Village.
I have just come across "Fingertips", a wonderful site (from the UK CITV show) which has some tremendous ideas for crafty kids. Activities are broken down into sections such as "parties", "green", "1 minute" and "techno". Be warned - you may well have difficulty dragging your children away from the site once they see the sort of inspiration available. Highly recommended!
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King Day is celebrated in the US on the 3rd Monday of January (17th January 2005). Please visit Activity Village’s new page of Martin Luther King activities and links, which you can find here.
If you or your children love frogs, you will love this site full of froggy delights. Photos and wallpapers, colouring pictures, games, jokes, stories, fables, facts, lesson plans ... enough to keep frog fans amused for hours.
Here are two cheerful poems on the subject of frogs:
THE FROG
by Hilaire Belloc
Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As "Slimy skin," or "Polly-wog,"
Or likewise "Ugly James,"
Or "Gap-a-grin," or "Toad-gone-wrong,"
Or "Bill Bandy-knees":
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).
THE OPTIMISTIC FROG
Author unknown
Two frogs fell into a large cream bowl.
One was an optimistic soul,
But the other took the gloomy view,
"We shall drown" he cried, without more ado.
So with a last despairing cry
He flung up his legs and said "Goodbye."
Said the other frog with a merry grin,
"I can't get out, but I won't give in.
I'll just swim around till my strength is spent
And should I drown I'll be more content."
Bravely he swam till it would seem
His struggles began to churn the cream.
On top of the butter at last he stopped,
And out of the bowl he gaily hopped.
What is the moral? Tis easily found:
If you can't hop out, keep swimming round!
I have an ongoing challenge with my son, whose vocabulary could do with some improvement: he is trying to confront me with a word which I don't know. I'm glad to say he hasn't managed yet, although I am not sure how consistently he is trying! Luckily he wasn't around today when I came across the word ranidaphobia and had to look it up in the dictionary.
10-year old Tilly Smith, from our village of Oxshott, Surrey, put her geography lessons to good use when she spotted the early warning signs of the tsunami in Phuket and convinced her parents to warn other holiday makers on the beach. She is credited with saving some 100 tourists with her quick thinking .... well done Tilly! Read the whole story here.
To encourage your own kids to take an interest in geography there is probably no better place on the internet to start than National Geographic Kids, one of our all-time favourite sites. Its bright colours, appealing graphics and easy-to-use interface make it a hit will all ages of children, who will find colouring pictures, games, experiments, cartoons and, of course, some gentle education to amuse them. Highly recommended.
Older children wanting to know more about why tsunamis occur and the geography of Asia might take a look at the online videos currently available at Discovery School. But a word of warning .... I personally found the tsunami video quite difficult and frightening to watch, even though (and perhaps because) it was made before the South East Asian disaster.
I am thrilled to welcome you to the first entry in the new Activity Village Blog - probably the most exciting development at Activity Village in its 4-year history.
The Activity Village Blog will offer regularly updated entries - usually daily - specifically aimed at you as parent, grandparent or teacher. Visit every day and enjoy our latest "discoveries" on the net as well as parenting articles, educational and fun links, inspirational stories, poems and quotes, website and online game reviews .... in fact anything which we think will interest you, help you or inspire you! And whenever we add new content to Activity Village, we will announce it here too.
With so much out there on the web these days, and with so much of it inappropriate, unsafe or frankly uninspiring, it is easy to miss some of the wonderful content which is freely available for young children. We aim to find it for you, and publish it here, at the Activity Village Blog! Please join us!
Note: For those of you who have discovered RSS, we are publishing the Activity Village Blog as an RSS feed so that you don't have to come to us, but we can come to you! And for those of you have haven't yet heard of RSS (that includes the vast majority of internet users) we will explain more about this exciting application soon.
