The following websites were designed with kids in mind, helping parents to navigate the (often tricky) waters of media, digital literacy, and age-appropriate materials.
Websites for Kids
Children
These booklists highlight diverse voices including racial diversity and sexuality.
Common Sense Media is the leading independent nonprofit organization dedicated to helping kids thrive in a world of media and technology. It helps families make smart media choices using the largest, most trusted library of independent age-based and educational ratings and reviews for movies, games, apps, TV shows, websites, books, and music. Their Parent Concerns and Parent Blog help families understand and navigate the problems and possibilities of raising children in the digital age.
The Diverse BookFinder is a collection of thousands of children's picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC), published and distributed in the U.S. since 2002. They offer a searchable database and a source of real-time data about who is in the books and how they are depicted.
For families of children with special health needs, chronic illness, or disability. This resource offers a directory of Early Intervention programs, as well as information on services and community resources. It also provides emotional support through a parent-to-parent matching program. Family TIES is a project of the Federation for Children with Special Needs, funded by and in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Bureau of Family Health and Nutrition, Division for Children and Youth with Special Health Needs.
The Multnomah County Library Homework Center organizes thousands of carefully reviewed K-12 education and homework resources for students, teachers, media specialists, and librarians.
The goal of the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) Foundation is to build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world. Ultimately, the Foundation aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community.
KidLit TV is a winner of the Parents’ Choice Gold Award and has been selected as an American Association of School Librarians Best Digital Tool for Teaching and Learning. KLTV is available in over 700,000 schools worldwide via their website and video distribution partners. This diverse group of parents, educators, librarians, kid lit creators, and award-winning filmmakers works together to create fun new ways to reinforce an appreciation of reading that children will carry with them for the rest of their lives.
The purpose of kids-in-mind.com is to provide parents and other adults with objective and complete information about a film's content so that they can decide, based on their own value system, whether they should watch a movie with or without their kids.
The Juvenile Series and Sequels database contains over 36,000 books in 4,900 series titles that are classified into three audiences: juvenile easy (birth through second grade readers), juvenile (second through sixth grade readers), and young adult (sixth through twelfth grade readers).
Created by the Association for Library Service for Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association. The Notable Children’s Digital Media list includes real-time, dynamic, and interactive media content for children 14 years of age and younger that enables and encourages active engagement and social interaction while informing, educating, and entertaining in exemplary ways.
A comprehensive resource addressing many aspects of bullying. Includes a "Get Help Now" button to provide quick assistance to victims.
Teens
These booklists highlight diverse voices including racial diversity and sexuality.
Search for schools, learn about financial aid and start planning for college.
This guide is created to help students understand the qualifications for financial aid.
Apply for financial aid through the U.S. Department of Education, and get help preparing for college, and managing and repaying your student loans.
YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) has launched its new Teen Book Finder, a free database and app that can access nearly 4,000 titles. The app is Android and iOS compatible and features: the ability to search for books by author, title, award/list year, genre, by award, and by book list; a "Find It!" button, powered by the OCLC WorldCat Search API, that will show users where to find the book in a nearby library; a "Favorites" button, to create an individualized booklist; and the ability to share books from the Teen Book Finder on Twitter and Facebook.