Online Resources For Kids Sheltered At Home

As kids everywhere remain sheltered in place with no definitive end in sight, many parents are feeling overwhelmed with the task of keeping their spirits up and their minds engaged.  Fortunately, many organizations have stepped in to help.  

Websites around the world have begun offering free resources to engage your kids mentally, physically, and emotionally.  Here are some of the best ones available.

Mindfulness and Mental Health

Afterschool Village is providing several different free mental health resources including Zoom yoga classes and interactive parent discussions with highly trained mental health professionals. 

Calm Together offers a collection of meditations, sleep stories, movement exercises, journals, and music to help both children and adults recenter and stabilize.

Cosmic Kids Yoga has free Youtube classes on Yoga, mindfulness, and relaxation, designed to help kids aged 3 and older become stronger, calmer, and wiser.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is sharing a series of guided mindfulness meditations accompanied by aquarium creatures in motion.

The Child Mind Institute has a wealth of resources including facebook live chats with expert clinicians, celebrity videos about mental health, online articles, and a crisis logger where you can share your mental health concerns during this time and listen to challenges that other people are facing.

Moovlee is a series of YouTube videos about using exercise, meditation and breathing techniques to help children with their social, emotional, and physical development.

Theater

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is the only original Off-Off-Broadway venue still in operation. It is currently presenting unique performances and hands-on workshops for children to help them question how art can function and how we as a society can survive challenging periods of history.

Green Quarantine The Broadway Green Alliance is hosting virtual sessions aimed at harnessing creative ways to remain connected to each other and the earth. The Zoom classes are hosted by members of the theatre and environmental community and cover a wide range of green topics. The classes offer a really unique way of presenting environmental topics.

Lincoln Center At Home offers an amazing full schedule of classes, theater performances, music and dance for children and families at home. 

The Children’s Theater Company presents a variety of fun, at-home theater activities, including a weekly writing contest in which children have the opportunity to see their script performed live by the theater company.

Reading and Writing

Dav Pilkey At Home The author of Captain Underpants hosts a weekly free online video series New videos are posted each Friday and include drawing lessons and read-alouds from Pilkey. 

Storytime From Space provides an exciting opportunity for children to listen to books read by astronauts in the International Space Station.

Storytime Online offers videos of well-known celebrities like Betty White and Elijah Wood reading books for children.

Harry Potter At Home gives kids the opportunity to watch and listen to the first Harry Potter book read by special guest narrators…. beginning with the original Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe.  The site also contains many quizzes, puzzles, fun videos and features related to the Harry Potter Books.

Afterschool Village offers free zoom writing classes taught by Eric Kaplan, writer for "The Big Bang Theory" "Flight of the Conchords" "Futurama" "Malcolm in the Middle" and “Young Sheldon".  In these hands-on workshops, kids and adults will learn the basics of storytelling and write an actual script.

Live Storytime with Mayim Bialik Actress/author Mayim Bialik from The Big Bang Theory does a live weekly storytime for kids of all ages.

The Kennedy Center Mo Willems, the beloved author of the Pigeon series, the Elephant and Piggy books, and Knuffle Bunny, hosted a three-week run of weekday Lunch Doodles for kids that is accessible online. 

Art and Music

The Metropolitan Opera is offering free nightly streams of opera masterpieces.

MetKids provides kids with creative projects, fun facts, and interactive access to 5,000 years of art.

Time For Kids TIME for Kids creative director Drew Willis and ten-year-old Rosie work together to host a virtual art lesson. While Drew creates elaborate drawings with Fresco and Photoshop using his graphic tablet, Rosie contributes to the lesson using physical media like pen and paper, crayons and pencils.

Little Kids Rock Every weekday at 12PM EST, this site is offering free half-hour-long music lessons on a variety of topics including rapping, making a garage band, and creating hip-hop music.

Physical Fitness

GoNoodle offers playful, engaging movement and mindfulness videos created by child development experts.

Go With YOYO provides a series of high-energy at-home exercise videos for kids. The activities are fun and playful and keep kids active.

Walkabouts is temporarily offering free access to their site dedicated to fun, movement-rich activities for kids from pre-K to second grade while they are home from school.

Science

NASA At Home has a wealth of resources including formal lesson plans, amazing images, and fascinating stories about how science and exploration are lifting our world. They’re also offering  opportunities to chat and interact with scientists directly.

The Smithsonian Along with the vast array of activities, games, videos, and interactive resources that they typically offer, the Smithsonian is providing new distance -learning resources for students sheltered at home.

National Geographic  Every weekday at 2 pm ET, National Geographic’s Explorer Classroom will offer live video events connecting students with cutting-edge scientists and researchers, transformative educators and powerful storytellers across all seven continents.

The Exploratorium is offering a very extensive interactive lesson about viruses and the COVID-19 pandemic for kids sheltered at home.

The California Science Center offers weekly live video streams, along with easy-to-follow science lessons and activities, all using common household items.

Skype A Scientist allows kids to be matched with a real scientist and have a question and answer session with them over live video chat.

Social Studies

Mr Betts Class This Youtube channel gives kids access to many different social studies and history lessons presented in a wildly humorous way

The Gilder Lehrman Institute Of American History provides a family version of the EduHam program in which students study primary source documents from the Founding Era, learn how Lin-Manuel Miranda used such documents to create the musical Hamilton, and create their own original performance pieces based on the same material.

Other Fun

Hello Bello is offering an online “camp” for kids.  Run by actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, the camp offers weekly schedules of singing, dancing, storytime, and other virtual fun.

Guinness Book Of World Records shows kids how they can participate in challenges and even apply to break world records. The site includes weekly challenges called the #gwrchallenge, where participants have a week to become the best at things like flipping and catching a full suit of playing cards faster than anyone else in the world. 

BrainPop, an educational video site, is offering free access to kids who are at home due to the pandemic. The site consists of fun, animated videos that cover Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health, and Technology in an entertaining way.

Delish Every weekday at 1 pm EST, Delish's editorial director Joanna Saltz and her kids will be going live on Instagram to share cook-along videos for parents and children.

Waterford is giving young learners access to nine virtual field trips including the Great Wall Of China, the Louvre, and Mars.

Circletime for Kids is offering free access to their site which offers yoga, storytime, cooking and music lessons for kids up to six years old.