https://www.china-family-adventure.com
China Family Adventure:
While this website may have first been created to encourage adults to take children with them to China on vacation, it is packed with a lot of informative, engaging articles that upper-elementary students can read and comprehend. As part of my curriculum, students create an informational writing piece about a foreign country, and the Facts page gives an excellent overview about Chinese geography, its name and meaning, the flag, religions, and even starts to discuss China's economy. Within almost all broad topics are links to articles with additional, pertinent information. It is interesting to note that the only topic that does not have additional articles is that of the government which is described as "a socialist republic, ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of China." There are no additional links that describe what communism and socialism are, or that go into greater detail about the history of the Chinese governments.
The Chinese Culture tab has a plethora of topics from holidays and festivals to how to eat with chopsticks and the Crafts tab has a lot of fairly simple craft ideas that I can use when we discuss and learn about Chinese New Year.
Overall, the language is mostly kid-friendly, although there are some more archaic terminology (stationary vs still) that students might need to look up, and some verbiage definitely demonstrates that the author is not a native English writer, but this is much more accessible than other sites. Each topic has photographs with children in them.
As it is a .com site, one major drawback is that there are TONS of ads and pop ups. This is a site that would require lots of reminders for students to not click on the ads.
Overall, the site is very user/kid friendly and easy to navigate with the 5 major menu tabs listed at the top right of the page.
I recommend this site for upper-elementary students who need to do research about China or its culture, with the warning about the excessive ads.
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