DK, publisher of the hugely popular line of DK Eyewitness books for children, has created an interactive, online "encyclopedia" website for children. The site is certified by kidSAFE and offers totally free access.
Students can search for topics or they can look through major categories: animals and nature, computer coding, dinosaurs and prehistoric life, earth, history, human body, language arts, math, music/art/literature, science, space, sports, and transportation. There are a few other special categories under “More Find Out” such as Braille or festivals and holidays. I randomly searched for “chocolate” and got an interesting and relatively long article on “The Story of Chocolate.” I also searched for “pollution” and came up with at least two pertinent articles. Even though my search for “Legos” turned up nothing, it is worth trying other search terms to see what you might find.
Even more so than most DK books, this site allots the majority of the space in each article to images, accompanying them with brief text. Images are often labeled. Sometimes there are links within an article to other articles on subtopics. Some articles include videos, activities, or quizzes. I expect that most of the content originally came from books published by DK. If you want more information on any subjects on the website, you can almost certainly find a DK book on the topic.
The computer coding section seems unusual given the other topical areas, but DK has published a few books on the topic for children. This section of the site introduces children to beginning coding in Scratch and Python (introductory computer languages), but they will need more help than they will find on the site to actually start coding. (You might check out DK Coding in Scratch Workbook or Help Your Kids with Computer Coding.)
Since content on most subjects is brief, the site will be best for students in about first through fifth grade. While the new DK findout! series is a source for some of the content on this site, there is much more content than what is in those books.
Under Teacher Resources, you can sign up for free lesson plans, worksheets, and newsletters from DKfindout! You will also be able to access free sample ebooks from the DKfindout! series of books, and students might use the ebook samples for more information. You can see some samples of the teacher resources without signing up. You might find that some of the lesson plans help you enhance your curriculum with little work on your part. (Note that the free sample lesson plan on the Stone Age is entirely based upon evolutionary assumptions. Also, it identifies particular hominids as being ancestors of humans which has been disproved through genetic evidence.)
I’m sure DK hopes to promote sales of their books with this site, but even so, you can save yourself some trips to the library with all of the information on this site. It is also a safe place to let your children explore on their own. Thanks to DK for making this available for free.
