Say it like this

For the child

Imagine every computer in the world is a house, and every house is connected to every other house by a road.

When you ask your tablet for a cartoon, it writes a tiny note that says "please send the cartoon" and sends it down the road. The note gets passed house to house until it reaches the computer that actually has the cartoon. Then that computer sends the cartoon back, in a whole lot of tiny pieces, down the same roads.

All of that happens in less time than it takes you to blink.

The internet is not inside your phone. Your phone is one house. The internet is all the roads, and all the other houses, and the notes going back and forth on them constantly, day and night, whether anybody is looking or not.

For the grown-up

What is actually going on underneath

The house-and-road picture is standing in for packet switching, and it holds up surprisingly far. Messages get broken into pieces, the pieces are routed independently, and they are reassembled at the other end.

The correction being made here is the one almost every child needs. They think the internet is the device. Establishing that the device is one participant in a network, rather than the network itself, is the thing that makes websites, servers and search engines explicable later. Without it, all three collapse into "stuff inside the phone."

Worth resisting the cloud metaphor entirely at this age. It is a marketing word that describes somebody else computer in a building, and it makes the subject less concrete rather than more.

Do something with it

Draw the internet

Draw the road a message takes from your house to the computer that has what you asked for. Most children draw it wrong the first time, usefully.

Open the activity

Ask afterward

Four questions that usually go somewhere

Where does the cartoon actually live before you watch it?
Is the internet inside your phone?
What happens to the message if one road is broken?
Who owns all the roads?

Words in this one

If they ask what a word means

Internet Computers talking to other computers. All of them, all over the world, all the time. Computer A machine that follows instructions very fast and never gets bored of doing the same thing again. Server A computer whose whole job is holding things and handing them over when somebody asks. Website A place on the internet where somebody keeps their things so other people can come and look. Network A group of things connected together so they can pass messages to each other.

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.