Big ideas. Young minds. Purple dogs.

The Internet

What Is a Website?

A website is a place on the internet where somebody keeps their stuff so other people can come look at it.

Say it like this

For the child

If the internet is all the roads, a website is a house on one of them.

Somebody built that house. They chose what goes in each room, what the front door looks like, and what you see first when you walk in. Nothing on a website got there by accident. A person decided.

Every house has an address so you can find it again. That is what the letters at the top of the screen are. Type the address, arrive at the house.

Here is the part most grown-ups have not thought about either. Anybody can build one. You can build one. It is a lot like building a fort, except the fort has an address and people can visit it from anywhere in the world.

For the grown-up

What is actually going on underneath

Two ideas matter here and the second one is the one worth the effort.

The first is that a website is a location with an address, distinct from the network it sits on. That completes the three-part separation started in the internet explanation.

The second is authorship. Every child now grows up with screens full of content that arrives as though it were weather, and the single most useful corrective is early and repeated: somebody made this, on purpose, for a reason. That one sentence is the root of media literacy, and it is easier to plant at five as a fact about houses than at fifteen as a warning.

The "you can build one" line is not filler. Children who understand that the thing is buildable relate to it differently, and it is also true.

Do something with it

First ten internet words

Word cards for the vocabulary in this topic area, with the crayon-level meaning on one side.

Open the activity

Ask afterward

Four questions that usually go somewhere

  • Who decided what goes on the front of your favorite website?
  • Why did they put that part first?
  • If you built a website, what would be in it?
  • What is the difference between the internet and a website?

Words in this one

If they ask what a word means

Website A place on the internet where somebody keeps their things so other people can come and look. Internet Computers talking to other computers. All of them, all over the world, all the time. Server A computer whose whole job is holding things and handing them over when somebody asks. Browser The window you look at websites through. It goes and fetches the page, then shows it to you. Search Engine A helper that already went and looked at nearly everything, so it can tell you where to go.

If they want more

The books

When an idea turns out to be worth forty pages instead of two, it becomes a book, and the books live next door at DigitalCrayonBooks.com. Here is how the two sites divide the work.