Kids Blog

If you’ve read the Nicholas books by Goscinny you should check out the Nicholas website – it’s got some cool games and activities, including Cowboys and Miniature Golf (which I was about as good at as I am in real life), plus you can join the Nicholas club and get some free stuff. So who or what is Nicholas then? The website does a better job of explaining than I ever could. Make sure you check out the books in the library too!

Hey guys check out this blog. This is a blog for kids with images, short stories, interesting contents and facts. Click on this link http://www.kidimg.com/.

Hey guys…do you like comic strips? Check out this site which has all the Peanuts strips EVER online! It’s called Comics.com. I was looking at a Peanut strip from 1950! We also have books on cartoons and how to draw them at the library.

Hi guys!

Do you often need info about New Zealand animals for your school homework sheets & projects? Then Kids Catalog Web can help! Navigate to the Explore section and choose NZ Aotearoa / NZ Animals. To see all the fantastic web pages on your chosen topic, click on the button of the animal you want. As this is a book catalog, it will usually come up with a list of books on that topic first. Just look for an icon with a spider sitting on a web (it’s on the left hand side of page and has the words see web pages) and click on that for the URLs.

Here’s some examples of the kinds of websites that you will find there…
Animal fact sheets:
New Zealand zoos have fact sheets on the animals that live there. Here’s the Hamilton Zoo site: Just click on Birds, Reptiles or Mammals and choose the fact sheet for the animal you want.

Animal Pests:
Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand is getting more and more stuff added all the time. In “The Bush” section you can check out all our native animals & insects plus their predators. But this section in Conservation is all about the Introduced Animal Pests which threaten our native wildlife.

 
Penguins:
There’s loads of info about our unique and endangered animals too like the Little Blue Penguin. The Oamaru Penguin Colony website has some great facts plus their life cycle.

 
Sharks: If you don’t mind the sight of blood – check out this site from the Auckland Museum about dissecting a Great White Shark.

If you love Peanuts cartoon strips then you’ll be very pleased to hear that you can view all the Peanuts cartoons ever on this website! Check it out!

Parents will love this particularly (and kids might find some useful tips). Pirate Parenting* is a site that makes fun of all the advice people give about how to raise kids so that they’re incredibly well behaved and all that. Pirate Parenting imagines what advice you’d need if you wanted your kids to turn into… pirates!

If you’re really into pirates you can check out what books we’ve got in the library. One really cool one is Piratepedia - everything you need to know and more.

If you’re on the internet and you’re looking for pirate sites, you might like to try this pirate webring (what’s a webring? Check out Sam’s post to find out.)

* Thank you to Magalie who got this from Twitter.

It’s only 6 weeks until Easter! Every year we get kids at the library asking us what is the meaning of Easter and where they can find out how to do Easter crafts. Luckily our Kids Catalog Web has loads of great books and websites on Easter. Check out the Easter icon on the Holidays & Festivals pages. Books in the catalog will be listed first (so you can check out what great books are at the library nearest you). But if you need info fast, just click on the spider icon to see the websites.

Do you use Google, Ask Yahoo or any other search engine to find cool stuff on the internet? Sometimes it is hard to find a website that you like – lots of the good site links are hidden in the pages and pages of results. Some of the websites listed in the results are really good, but some can be bad, rude or unsafe.

One way to help you find awesome and safe websites is to look for a webring. Webrings are sites that linked to each other in a “circular structure”, which means that if you were to visit all the sites in the webring you would come back to the website that you started on. Websites that are members of a webring all share a common theme. For example, all the websites in a Disney webring would have Disney games, pictures, stories and colouring, and the really cool thing is that Webrings often have rules for people who want to have their site join the ring, like no dirty or mean webpages.

Here are a couple of fun webrings to browse:

http://www.webring.com/hub?ring=wdisney
http://www.webring.com/hub?ring=kidz

Maybe you can look for some more webrings and share them with us!

The Children’s Digital Library is a website on the internet that lets you read books for free! You can choose the country where your story’s from and the language it’s written in. You can also select picture books, award winning books and check out the recently added books! They have almost 50 books from New Zealand in their collection including Kapai counts to ten (a smart little kiwi learns to count to ten in English & Maori). Check out this website by clicking here.

You can simpsonize yourself on the Simpsons Movie website.

When you’ve got your looks just right you can save the avatar and you can email it to your friends!