Kids.gov
From LIS 460 Summer 2007
Contents |
About Kids.gov
According to their website, Kids.gov is "the official kids' portal for the U.S. government", maintained by the Federal Citizen Information Center (FCIC) in Pueblo, CO. It is a kid-friendly site, designed for students in grades K-8. The purpose is to help kids find information about the U.S. and state governments as well as information contained on the websites of various government agencies at both the national and state levels.
When you go to the main page, in addition to information about the "site of the month" and links to "what's new", are dropdown menus for grades K-5, for grades 6-8, and for teachers. Each of these menus is broken down into sections, including:
- arts
- careers
- computers
- fun stuff
- government
- health, fitness and safety
- math
- money
- science
- social studies
- state websites
Within these sections you can find over 1200 links to sites governmental (.gov) in provenance, as well as some external sites.
Using Kids.gov in the school library media center
Kids.gov is a great place for kids to start when they are interested in learning more about any aspect of our government. Since all of the sites linked from Kids.gov have been reviewed as having content appropriate for children. However, it is important to keep in mind that the majority of the sites listed on Kids.gov are the websites of various governmental agencies, also designed for kids. This means that most of the information contained on these pages has been published or at least produced by the government. Fortunately within each category they do list Government Sites and Other Resources separately. Resources listed under Government Sites include state and military as well as federal sites.
There are other neat ways to use Kids.gov with students in an elementary or middle school library. You could do a webquest within the Kids.gov site, asking students to find sites that answer various questions. You could have students compare the information they get from government sites to information they get from private, educational, or non-profit sites. There are also lots of activities and interactive sites linked through Kids.gov, so you could do some exploring and find specific sites you'd like them to visit. For instance, there is the Smithsonian site, which has some fun and educational games, and the Money Central Station site has a few colorful activities that help kids learn about money and test their knowledge.
Links
Mentioned in the Librarian in Black blog
Important Notices regarding evaluation and inclusion criteria for sites
