Good morning all,
Stumbled across and tagged this gem, called Big Green Rabbit, months ago while flipping through the Fall 2009 Parent’s Choice Award Winner websites. This site is absolutely a keeper for the PreK – 2 set and has value in teaching fine motor skills / mouse control, music, dance, and more!
The Webby-award winning Big Green Rabbit site is a relatively small collection of commercial-quality interactive activities that makes up for its lack of depth with incredibly rich (and fun) multimedia.
Already a successful Denver-based PBS television show along the lines of Barney, Big Green Rabbit’s main characters, Charlie and Isabelle, “take our world’s 3 to 6 year old kids on health- and environmentally-focused adventures.” Read more about the philosophy of the site’s founders here.
I wasn’t able to preview the entire site but the parts I did see absolutely reflect the effective design, vibrant colors, engaging animation and fast load times that you’d expect from a TV-show companion website. The “Magic Door” activity shown below would be good for PreK kids and younger, or any student still developing their fine motor/mouse control skills.
Of note … the transition pages are particularly awesome … the animations will amuse you and amaze your students and/or children!
The best part of the site I did see what the “Learn a Dance” activity – Isabelle is a great teacher; her encouraging tone made ME want to get up and try those moves! This would be absolutely AWESOME in a Kindergarten classroom or music class – even in gym!
The final step in the “Learn to Dance” series is a neat music video with an inset featuring Isabelle and the Big Green Rabbit dancing along as models. I personally would have liked to see the inset a bit larger, but that’s just me.
These are just two of the activities featured on the Big Green Rabbit site. I’m pretty confident that the rest of the content is just as engaging, fun and ideal for use in the classroom or home school. It’s the kind of site that kids can navigate on their own, but like anything else, is best when experienced together as a joint learning activity with a caring parent or teacher!
Hope this helps!
-kj-
Hi, Kevin,
Thanks for posting this.
I am the creator of Big Green Rabbit and it was very nice to read what you wrote about the website. By the way, there are Lesson Plans that accompany each episode that can be found on our parent’s blog at http://www.biggreenrabbit.com/learnplay/
We all deeply appreciate your kind words and sharing Big Green Rabbit with others.
All the best,
Shane DeRolf
Founder and Chief Creative Officer
Big Green Company, Inc.
Hi Shane!
Thanks for commenting – and for the tip about the lesson plans! Shame on me for missing that! :) Love, love, LOVE the site!
-kj-