ABC Children's TV

Our ABC features a wonderful kids' hub with homepages for 11 home-grown shows - from Bananas in Pyjamas to The Saddle Club. Many of these have games or activities attached, such as making music with the Bananas, dressing Mixy, Play School recipes and craft suggestions and a Feral quiz. There are also chat rooms and e-cards to send. You'll need Macromedia Shockwave Player (www.shockwave.com) to play.

Sesame Workshop - Sesame Street

Patience is a virtue here. Graphic detail means it takes a while for anything to load, but who can resist the magnetic power of Cookie Monster (pictured) and Co? Whistle along to the Sesame Street tune as you click away to connect to games, stories and printable pictures. We recommend Elmo's World and a Sesame Music Zone, where you can listen to one of the show's songs or choose from options such as Global Groove, Sesame Street Opera and Song Bites. You'll need Shockwave 8.5 and it would be worth downloading the latest Flash player (www.flash.com).

FunBrain.com

The aim here is to make learning fun. Games include connect the dots, grammar gorillas, Proton Don (the periodic table), brain bowl (current events) and math baseball. Kids can also click on games aimed at specific age groups.

The Yuckiest Site on the Internet

There's nothing kids love more than things that gross out adults, so what better than a site that caters to it? Yucky.com is hosted by the Discovery Channel and Wendell the Worm, exploring cockroach and worm facts, playing games such as Toxic Waste and learning about your "gross and cool body: poop, gas, dandruff, sweat, zits, ear wax, digestion, circulation and more". Yeah!!!

Mama Lisa's World

This site is devoted to children's songs and rhymes from around the globe. The Australian category is fairly thin - Waltzing Matilda and two versions of Kookaburra - but you can submit your own local ditty. A personal favourite is a French Canadian rhyme, My Grandfather has Three Pigs, which goes: My grandfather has three pigs, one that smells, one that farts, one that smokes a cigarette.

Fun, free animated greeting cards for kids

Send your mate from kindy something special on his/her birthday - an animated e-card! Here you'll find e-cards for kids 0-6 and 6-10 with specific options for birthday, friendship, Christmas, etc. There are links to song, craft, game and puzzle pages and 15 new cards are added to the site mix each month.

Nickelodeon Online

A favourite site at our house, there's all the information one would expect about shows on the Nickelodeon cable channel, but the real drawcards are the silly games such as Sugar Rush (to "help Timmy scarf down as many sweet treats as possible") or the "groove tools", which allow you to do everything from creating a "rude tool noisemaker" to making a "Saturday Night Fever chimp" shake his booty on the dance floor.

KidsBookshelf - Bringing children and books together

An American hub for school-age kids, who can submit their own poetry, stories and book reviews, as well as read reviews of other work. A link to "great sites for kids" leads to information about geography, history (although a fair proportion of this is US-focused), science, music, English studies, arts and more. Of course, there's plenty of free fun in the games section, too, with 15 titles to choose from, including hangman and mastermind.

Wicked 4 Kids

A site created in Australia, this is aimed at primary school-age children and is populated by strange, colourful monsters called Boogerlings. There's a solid range of things to keep visitors busy: click on "play" for games (some of which take a while to load), "laugh" for jokes, rhymes and fairytales, "think" for crosswords, quizzes and puzzles, "create" for craft and cooking and "talk" for e-cards and chat boards.

Kids' jokes for children of all ages

Animal jokes, knock-knock jokes, monster jokes, Internet jokes, riddles, "really silly jokes" and more. There were 12,177 cracks listed on the site at the last visit. This is one of them: Q. Why don't vikings send emails? A. They prefer to use Norse code.

Questacon

Seek out the fun zone for puzzles, activities (such as science in your soup and how not to burst a balloon), optical illusions and a virtual tour of Questacon sure to satisfy any young science addict. The site will work best with Shockwave.

The Wiggles

There can't be a collection of kids' sites without including the Wiggles (pictured). This site is for younger kids and, while it naturally has concert information, merchandise and so forth, there are also regular Wiggly news updates, print-outs of the group and their friends to colour in, simple games to play (memory games, counting to 10) and a message board. Also, sign up for the monthly magazine.

The Exploratorium

The bricks and mortar Exploratorium is housed in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts and was founded more than 33 years ago by physicist Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame). The museum aims to be a place of "science, art and human perception" and so does the Web site. This is better suited to older children, who'll need to be pretty sharp to follow some of it, but budding science whizzes can immerse themselves in the construction of their own solar system, the science of a number of sports and interactive online exhibits. There are also 10 "cool sites" to discover every month.

Kids on the Net

A site that encourages creative writing. There's stories, poems and special-event writing (Christmas, Easter, science fiction) from children across the globe who can submit their own work to go up on the site (the editor's pick gets highlighted). It also features a mysterious Kids' Castle, a Monster Motel and message boards on topics such as sport, computers and "all about me".

Kid Wizard - Education Games for Kids

Kids can take the hero's part in an interactive tale, learn science spells, make slimy potions such as Bile Brew and Hag Hash and try out the mazes, puzzles, logic games and interactive colouring book.

Australian Museum Online

Learn about everything from bats and sea slugs to indigenous Australia. Older kids can click on "students" for research information. Younger kids click on "kids" for fish information, the fish memory game (you need Flash 4 or better) or to find out more about colour, how we see it and make it and how it's used by animals.