Khan Academy for Primary Kids

Last week, I was surprised to learn that none of my students had heard of Khan Academy. Although mainly aimed at secondary topics, many subjects, such as mathematics, start at the very beginning with basic arithmetic.

Every topic has a short video lecture and a comments section to clarify any confusing points. Although the videos can be watched without logging in, it really is worth creating an account as you can keep track of your progress with the Knowledge Map. This shows you all the topics you have completed, those that you need to go back to and those new topics that follow logically from those you have already done. Khan Academy is now huge and the Knowledge Map will help you through the forest.

Cryptograms for Kids

A few weeks back we spent a couple of sessions on cryptography and code cracking. By far the most popular site with my students was Cryptograms.org.

It has a nice clean interface and the letters are easy to input. Every cryptogram is a quotation, so you end up with (hopefully) something interesting to read at the end. However, this does mean that the quotations may have some long or unfamiliar words, but learning new words is also part of the fun! The one thing Cryptograms doesn't let you do is to see a full solution if you've given up on a particularly tough puzzle.