Website Almost Back / Interesting Article

Thanks to the brilliant efforts of Matt and Ben, Activity Village now has its own dedicated server and will be back online within the next 24 hours - maybe sooner, depending on how quickly the changeover rolls out around the world.

The last couple of weeks have been incredibly frustrating for us, and we were very sad to have been unavailable over Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day - our busiest time of year. Thank you for your many emails and messages of support - and your patience!

Once the website is up again there is lots to explore over the next few weeks, including St David's Day, Mother's Day (in the UK), St. Patrick's Day, and of course Easter and Spring. We will be updating the last two sections over the next few days and adding lots of new activities.

* * * *

I enjoyed reading this article, "Hard Lessons at a Tender Age", and also recommend the DotMoms blog where it is posted as a source of interesting and well-written articles from many different viewpoints and dealing with all ages of children.

Website news / Science Fun

As our hosting company has failed to get Activity Village up and running again, I am moving the website to its own dedicated server (which will hopefully prevent a repeat of this nightmare!). If all goes well and the hosting company co-operates in moving the domain name across, Activity Village should be back online by the end of the week. Thank you for your patience.

In the meantime here are three (totally unrelated) websites to visit with your kids:

The Human Body Adventure: This is a wondeful site which will fascinate older children. An excellent "futuristic" introduction draws them in, and lots of illustrations and fun facts keep them there!

What can kids do to help protect the environment? Print out this 11-page colouring book for some ideas.

Cool Science for Curious Kids suggests some fun, easy experiments which will encourage children of all ages to notice what is going on around them.

Fun with children's names

This incredibly clever website has kept up amused for hours, typing in the names of everyone we know to see how popular their names have been over the last century. Great fun!

Little children learning to write love to trace their own name (or those of their siblings and friends). You can design your own tracer pages here, choosing your font, your words, and your illustrations too. Brilliant.

Older children might like to find out what their names mean at Behind The Name. They can also find out the equivalent of their name in other languages, whether they have any famous namesakes or name-day holidays, and whether there are any websites "specialising" in their name (please be careful with this one - obviously we can't check out those links for you!)

Website back by the weekend? And some fun links..

Will Activity Village be back up by the weekend? I certainly hope so! That is what the hosting company has promised me, and in my optimistic moments I think they might deliver. If they don't, I will have to resort to an alternative hosting solution, which may take a further few days to set up.

In the meantime, here are a few links to places to visit with your kids (especially if you are UK-based and looking for ways to keep them entertained this half-term).

Kratt's Creatures, a spin-off website from the TV series, is full of information about interesting animals from all around the world. Older kids will enjoy surfing around and will find some fun (and educational) games to play under "Creature Crazy".

Younger children will love CBeebies' Story Circle, where they can listen, watch and read along to an excellent selection of animated fairy tales, animal stories, world stories, bedtime stories and more! There is also a selection of delightful print and colour story books for off-computer fun.

Your kids may be used to much more sophisticated drawing tools these days, but I suspect they will still have fun with this online Etch-a-Sketch ..... if not, you can always have a go!

There are six little games here which may amuse your kids for a while. My testers really enjoyed "Funny Faces" and giggled endlessly while trying to decide on the facial expression you would pull if you heard a bee buzzing close to you.

More difficulties at website - please be patient!

I have just sent the following message to newsletter subscribers:

"This is just a brief message to apologise to any of you who have visited Activity Village over the last couple of days and either found the site down or "going slow". In the last two hours in particular there has been a message up implying that Activity Village no longer exists - but I assure you that isn't the case!

We have had such a phenomenal amount of visitors over the last two days that our hosting company, while doing its best, has been unable to provide the necessary bandwidth. They will be switching us to a new backbone in the next 10 days or so which should solve the problem, but in the meantime there may be short periods when the site goes slow again or even shuts down. Please have patience and stick with us - we are doing our best to get it sorted out as quickly as we possibly can!

The Activity Village Blog is on a different server and keeps going independently of the Activity Village website, so I will be posting messages there at least daily and trying to come up with other interesting sites which you can visit in the run-up to Valentine's Day.

Thank you for your understanding and support."

Website still playing up / craft site recommendation

I'm afraid we are still having trouble with the website. It was back on the net earlier today (albeit very, very slow) but has just disappeared again, hopefully while somebody fixes it! Please keep checking back to see if the problem is solved :)
Meanwhile, if you are looking for craft inspiration, try Zoomdo, where you will find some fun ideas for keeping your kids busy.

Website down

I'm sad to say that Activity Village has been down for quite a few hours today, and there is still no sign of it reappearing. I am crossing fingers that the problem will be sorted out quickly and it will be back online again soon.

Excellent online learning resource

Primary Games.co.uk has an excellent (and enormous) selection of online maths learning games for children aged up to 11. Designed for sale to schools, you can nevertheless try evaluation versions indefinitely (although you will have to put up with the words "For Evaluation Only" written across the screen). There are some really clever, fun games here, many of which have supporting worksheets too.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page you will find links to the other sites in the Primary Games stable: Teaching Time, Teaching Tables, Teaching Measures, Teaching Money (UK) and Maths Packs, all of which are very well worth a visit (be prepared to stay a while!)

An Englishman's castle ....

Have a look at this new (but growing) site all about English castles. Older kids may enjoy exploring the site on their own: there is quite a bit to learn and enjoy, including sections on toy castles and haunted castles. There are also some super printables – colouring pages, a “spot the difference” and a couple of worksheets on designing your own coat of arms and a knight’s armour.

February Newsletter and More Added to Site

The February edition of the newsletter is now up at the site - find it here. Also new at Activity Village today is a page of Valentine's Day Jokes to get the kids giggling, and a printable Animal Dominoes game.