Fraboom Online Children's Museum
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What parents need to know
Parents need to know that Fraboom is a slightly scattershot online museum that dazzles with cool graphics, a team of entertaining young adults with tons of creative energy, and a reasonable amount of educational bang for your buck. Train Your Brain live hosts interact with kids via live chat and one-way video of the host, but kids can't interact with each other. Two informational exhibits cleverly disguise advertising with links to outside commercial sites, so steer your kids clear if they tend to click on everything in sight.
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What's it about?
There are a handful of different "exhibits" to explore in this online museum. FRABOOM DRAWING ACADEMY offers instructional videos, 34 thematic sets of drawing downloadables, and video drawing lessons. Three online channels are the source of video content for the rest of the site. Three interactive books cover insects, anatomy, and drawing characters with full-text audio, rhyming verses, and clever sound effects. Live game-show-like video classes and lessons add pizzazz. Twenty games are thematic but uninspiring, and two exhibits have some lessons designed for teachers and families.
Is it any good?
Funny hats, big glasses, llama spit, and missed fist pumps. Billed as an online museum, Fraboom shines more as a creativity incubator for performing arts, graphics animations, and cartooning. If you can look past the uninspiring games and an old-school, unenlightened approach to "nasty" germs plus characters literally sticking their arms into African-species ant hills, this site has some truly cool stuff to offer.
Two "exhibits" combine live classes, videos, informational activities, and 10 lengthy activity sets including human saliva experiments; unfortunately, prominent ads with external links also are featured. Three synchronous or on-demand "TV channels" draw you in -- one with homespun wackiness and inspiring models for kids looking to the stage or a television career. The Drawing Academy is another of Fraboom's strengths, with the Kartoon Kow series and more showing kids step by step how to create cartoon images of fish, monsters, spiders, faces, and more. The interactive books embed lots of facts within rhyming animated pages, but there are only three, which leads to Fraboom's major flaw: It has a little of everything, and there's often too much going on.
Talk to your kids about ...
Families can talk about art and artists. Visit real museums and explore drawing techniques together.
Discuss the role of insects in nature and human society.
Website details
- Subjects: Language & Reading: following directions, phonics, reading comprehension, vocabulary
Science: animals, biology, life cycle
Arts: acting, drawing, playing, rhythm, theater - Skills: Thinking & Reasoning: applying information, collecting data, memorization, part-whole relationships
Creativity: combining knowledge, imagination, making new creations
Self-Direction: academic development, effort - Genre: Educational
- Topics: Bugs
Themes & Topics
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For kids who love museum fun
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