Site of the Month: KidsPoint.org

KidsPoint—the children's services site of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, based in Fredericksburg, VA—is bright and colorful and features plenty of graphics and interactive features geared toward its 7- to 12-year-old audience.

Zoom!: Adriana Puckett (apuckett@crrl.org), the library's senior Web manager, runs KidsPoint with input from the children's services staff and Virginia Johnson, the system's Web content librarian. Together, they select and develop games and quizzes, as well as reading lists and links to homework help resources. Johnson also contributes a series of columns called "All Fun"—a popular example is "Zoom! Make and Fly a Paper Airplane" (www.kidspoint.org/columns2.asp?column_id=694&column_type=kpfun). KidsPoint also includes brief transcripts of booktalks that the system's children's librarians present in schools each year.

For the Youngest Children: Puckett is particularly proud of KidsPoint Jr. (www.kidspoint.org/kidspointjr_index.asp), for parents and caregivers of children under seven. It includes advice on emergent literacy skills and lists of recommended early childhood books for adults. Puckett plans to add recordings of stories, told in audio and video format, to KidsPoint Jr. within the next year.