
Zen and Mishka watching a Sesame Street playlist on her computer.
The hard drive on my trusty laptop failed about 3 months ago. Fortunately, I had been backing up the data via Mozy.com (highly recommended – it saved everything!) So I ordered a new laptop and had the old one repaired so Ali and Zen could use it. Although Zen can navigate a touch screen phone/tablet, she can’t do much on the laptop independently yet because of the keyboard/mouse limitations (other than watch videos). Ali can navigate her way around rather well. They have unlimited access to the computer and I thought it would be a big hit, but the girls rarely ask to bring it out. I occasionally put it out as part of my strewing, and sometimes there is interest. Here are the sites I have bookmarked for them to discover:
- Starfall
- Sesame Street (channel on youtube)
- NASA Kids Club
- National Geographic – Little Kids
- Discovery Kids
- Watch Know Learn (filter by age)
- PBS Kids
- Peep and the Big Wide World - Games and Videos
- ABC Mouse
- BBC Cbeebies – Games and Story Time (Ali likes Alphablocks)
- Poisson Rouge
- Tumble Bo*ks (free if accessing it by this link)
Eventually they will have a touch screen tablet/notebook, which is much more intuitive for the younger crowd than a keyboard/mouse. I guess it’s only a matter of time before everything is touch screen. In the meantime, I’m still setting up their computer and will soon add movies and pictures. Any other ideas to help make this educational tool more useful for them? Any websites your 2-4 year olds love?
*End notes. Some people get nervous when they hear “unlimited access”, so I’m happy to explain more about our media situation at home. First, our kids are outside the house about 5 hours every day running around and doing interesting things. Second, we don’t have television (because my husband and I can’t stomach the ads). Third, our girls have unlimited access to Russian and English language movies and they are very responsible with that. Fourth, we spend absolutely tons of time interacting with our girls all day long. At this age, they would much rather be playing with us, reading with us, talking with us or going out with us than engaging with media.
A pattern seems to be emerging – a screen only seems to go on if someone could use a little zone-out / quiet time. I’ll put my youngest in front of the computer or movie if I desperately need a 20 minute break (but this does not happen on a daily basis). I also turn the computer or movie on daily for my oldest for 30 minutes while I’m helping Zen fall asleep at nap time. After bath, some days they want to watch part of a movie for about half an hour before bed, and we all quite like this bit of down time before transitioning to books and sleep.
Total screen time including movies and computer: our older daughter watches about 1.5 hours daily, and our younger daughter watches about 20-30 minutes daily. I should also mention that I am well aware of the studies involving media and children. One of the reasons we do not limit screen time is because we trust that our children know exactly what types of activities are best for their developing brains and they gravitate toward those activities naturally. If we were to impose artificial limitations, they would lose the ability to follow their intuition in this regard.























