Online Nursery School

Yahoo! News reports Before they can even read, almost one in four children in nursery school is learning a skill that even some adults have yet to master: using the Internet. Some 23 percent of children in nursery school — kids age 3, 4 or 5 — have gone online, according to the Education Department. By kindergarten, 32 percent have used the Internet, typically under adult supervision. The numbers underscore a trend in which the largest group of new users of the Internet are kids 2 to 5. At school and home, children are viewing Web sites with interactive stories and animated lessons that teach letters, numbers and rhymes.

I have been wanting to find some Early Childhood Education teachers to help us identify Public Domain programs for PreSchool and Kindergarten to expand our Children Image. Now it looks like we may have to merge that image with our Net Image and come up some good links as well.

"Young students don't differentiate between the face-to-face world and the Internet world," said Susan Patrick, who oversees technology for the department. "They were born into the age of the Internet. They see it as part of the continuum of the way life is today." At a preschool age, children need some grown-up help to get online, said Francie Alexander, chief academic officer for children's book publisher Scholastic Inc. One of their favorite computer activities is writing an e-mail to a grandparent, said Alexander, author of a children's guide to the Internet. "It's great for letter recognition," she said. "Everybody likes to get mail and little kids don't have great tolerance for waiting. So the whole idea that they can write grandma and get an e-mail back a half-hour later saying, 'I got your note' — they love that." Scholastic has a section of its Web site that is intended just for children, who go online to read, write and play with "Clifford the Big Red Dog." PBS Kids Online has more than a dozen educational Web sites for preschool children, including "Sesame Street" and "Barney and Friends." Overall computer use, too, is becoming more common among the youngest learners. Department figures show that two-thirds of nursery school children and 80 percent of kindergartners have used computers.