Comments on: Teaching the Small Person XHTML

By: Peter Mount

Peter Mount — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:38:41 +0000

Sorry Mike. I shouldn’t have put it that way. I have had second thoughts about what I said about it being “no harm” for the young ones learning with old style html. I only said it because I’m not qualified in teaching and I wouldn’t know how to teach a young one how to use xhtml in a way they’d understand. I’d really need some sort of online or printed reference to help me with that.

By: Mike Jones

Mike Jones — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 07:37:05 +0000

NO HARM! Thats what they said when they started using the tag…

By: Peter Mount

Peter Mount — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 11:27:35 +0000

Rachel, the Minister in charge of the Children’s Ministy at my church might like copies of those work sheets. That’s if your going to post them online somewhere. Otherwise I’m sure the Web Monkey for Kids site would be good enough (I know it’s not proper xhtml with css but if it gets the little ones interested then there’s no harm).

By: Drew

Drew — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 12:31:48 +0000

The Webmonkey for Kids stuff seems to be quite well explained, but it’s all old-skool presentational HTML. If starting from scratch in this day and age, it really needs to be CSS and XHTML.

I wonder how she’d get along with XSLT.

By: FT

FT — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:22:08 +0000

Rachel – recently discovered there is a Webmonkey for Kids. Not sure I particularly like the colour scheme (or the jokes…) but it might be worth a quick look.

Is your Small Person into chapter books yet? That’s quite a useful analogy for explaining the semantics of headings – admittedly, it only gives you H1 (for the book) and H2 (for the chapters), but from there on you have a point of reference.

Cheers,

By: John Oxton

John Oxton — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 09:59:51 +0000

This does sound very interesting Joshua, all three years of him, has just started getting the whole website thing and likes to pretend to “work” on my stuff anyway of encouraging this would be great but it is a toughie for sure!

By: Matthew Pennell

Matthew Pennell — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 09:33:48 +0000

I would have thought that a 7-year-old would find it reasonably easy to grasp the concept of a tree-structure – perhaps that would be a way to tackle explaining the relative levels of headings (“so this bit of text belongs under this heading – but where does the heading belong? Under the first heading – so we’ll make that a Level 2 heading to show that it is underneath the Level 1 heading.”)

Maybe sketching out a sort of ‘content-only’ DOM would help?

By: Mike Jones

Mike Jones — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 07:05:16 +0000

Brilliant! Noah (aged 3) has just started using the trackpad on the laptop that sits on the hatch in our kitchen. I’m worried he’s going to be freaked out by a mouse if we don’t move him to that soon!