To date, we haven't let Cal do much computing on his own. Any computer skills he has (navigating with the mouse, using the keyboard) he really learned at school. This is by design -- we have one laptop with our lives on it, and we just haven't trusted our kids to use it without damaging it or its contents. Plus, no computer use is an easy way to control what they're exposed to.
This afternoon, I walked into the toy room/office and found Cal sitting at the desk, his right hand moving the mouse and his eyes looking intently at the computer screen. I'm not sure why, but I let him keep doing it and just asked, "What are you looking at, Baby Bear?"
He told me, "the weather."
I walked over to the desk and looked at the screen with him. Sure enough, he was looking at the Yahoo Weather page with the below-freezing forecast for the next five days. I directed him to the "Details" section of the page where he read the text and learned we might get some snow tomorrow. And then we glanced at the Sun & Moon and Wind & Pressure sections, but didn't talk about them.
On the right, there was a link to a Hurricane Tracker, which sounded interesting; so we clicked on it and navigated our way to a map that showed the paths of the various hurricanes of 2013. Evidently, hurricane levels were the lowest they've been for 20-ish years. We found a video and clicked on that. I needed to step out for a few minutes, so I left Cal to watch that on his own.
Before I returned, Cal was looking for me. He needed help getting "back to the weather on the computer." I just think that's so cool. I don't know that he really knew what he was looking at, but I liked that he was excited about using the computer and excited about using it to see the weather. So I found that Yahoo Weather page again for him.
I also think it's cool that Cal is exposing me to all of this weather stuff and new weather sites on the internet. Is my kid already teaching me things?
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