Internet Safety

Internet Safety has been on the agenda this week.

The kids are using the internet more and more independently these days, they love nothing more than to surf the net looking for the things that have taken their interest.

Oliver was playing on the school of dragons and was very excited that he could speak to other people and then another incident occurred where Oliver and Olivia had made some toilet paper sculptures that they where preparing to paint and they wanted to do a Blue Peter style video of them making these sculptures, whilst we where doing the video Oliver shouted a cute line near the end about people can buy these and they can come to..... our full address.... I kind of thought it was time to have a talk about safety and what kinds of information is and what information is not acceptable to give out to people that we do not know personally.

We have had the stranger danger talk on many occasions but it still felt like another a step towards them loosing their innocence, another step towards growing up and leaving childhood behind, another chip off the old innocence block.

We had the chat about people can sometimes not be who they say they are, and how there are some people out there who can cause us harm by steeling personal information, or someone could send us viruses, addiction to the internet and spending to much time online, we talked about bullying and we talked about some of the things we can do to keep us safe.

I don't want to drag this out and make a huge deal out of it putting them under pressure, but I have decided to do this in burst over a few days, we have had the talk and now over the next few days I will introduce them to an internet safety site called Kids Smart for them to explore. 

It is a good site it is very interactive and lots for them to explore, we can even get some reading practice in whilst we are at it and look at some lesson plans.

We already have rules when they are on the computer and they are very good at asking if something is allowed or not before they do anything so I am hopeful this will just reinforce what they already know.