Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Recommendations for Age-Appropriate Research?

Last night I was "helping" DD8 with some WWII-related online research. In this case, "helping" basically meant doing the research myself, then breaking it down into chunks small enough for an 8yo to digest. If you compared the content of her school-provided textbooks and research supplements with a garden-variety Wikipedia page, there's 10x more content and complexity online.

I'd much rather give her the tools to do it herself, and then let her do it herself. Anyone have any age-appropriate, online encyclopedias they can recommend?

Kids' Britannica has a free trial period. We have a hard copy set and the content is quite good.

http://kids.britannica.com

From the American Library of Congress:

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/

I'll second the advice to ask your school - either your dd's teacher or school librarian, and also ask at your public library. Our kids are older now, so I don't have any personal recommendations for that age, but fwiw, when our kids' school started having students do online research in early elementary, guided by the librarian, and were given specific search sites and reference sites and given a lot of guidance about how to know where to look for credible data. We were also given an id/pw that allows any student who is in school in our state to access a state web portal that provides free online access to a bunch of subscription websites that can be useful for students. The librarian at our public library was also really helpful when our kids were researching.

Best wishes,

polarbear

I am going to be old-school and suggest the library. I have wasted far too much time looking for good children's research resources online, though I am still open to suggestions. Many are too simple, cover too few topics, are badly written, inaccurate, etc. Sometimes you do get lucky, but rarely. Also, the average 8yo spends way too much time laboriously pondering web sites that are not the right ones. You don't realize how fast you "weed" as an adult doing web research till you watch a child this age doing it. Yes, yes, I know they need the skill, but in our case this took up way too much time, though DD had to research a vast # of topics for this one project.

Did you mean: http://www.discoveryeducation.com/ ?