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I have never really been into YouTube. I don't usually click on links that people put in their LJ posts, and I was never very interested in sitting around browsing through videos. I'm not patient enough. But I'm really starting to realize what a fantastic tool YouTube is for the parent of a curious preschooler. Because they have videos of everything on there.
I first got the idea from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bosssio, whose young son has a whole collection of garbage truck videos favorited on YouTube. That stuck in my mind, and when Alex expressed some interest in hammerhead sharks I dug around and came up with a bunch of short videos for her to watch. (Our favorites: this and this. Fascinating for adults but not for impressionable two-year-olds: this video in which a guy fishing for tarpon gets his catch stolen by a hammerhead.)
Tonight I showed Alex some more photos of the baby elephant at the Maryland Zoo. She wanted to see more, so I offered to look for YouTube videos of baby elephants.
Then she joined the topic of elephants to her current favorite fantasy-play subject, and asked me to find a video of an elephant going to the veterinarian. With the beauty of YouTube, it took me about five seconds to find a fascinating, non-gory, six-minute video of a bull elephant undergoing a tusk-ectomy at the Oregon Zoo. We went on to watch a video of elephants swimming in a river at an animal sanctuary, and then branched out to other animals visiting the vet. (I've just bookmarked this video of a random litter of Norwegian kittens at their first vet visit, amd this one of a litter of Rottweiler puppies, to show her tomorrow.)
I know that nothing beats giving a preschooler real experiences in the real world, and that YouTube isn't a substitute for that. And I know that for real information, books are a much better bet. But damn - if I can find a video of an elephant going to the vet? That means that I can find a video of anything. It's so cool to have a means of instantly satisfying her curiosity.
I first got the idea from
bosssio, whose young son has a whole collection of garbage truck videos favorited on YouTube. That stuck in my mind, and when Alex expressed some interest in hammerhead sharks I dug around and came up with a bunch of short videos for her to watch. (Our favorites: this and this. Fascinating for adults but not for impressionable two-year-olds: this video in which a guy fishing for tarpon gets his catch stolen by a hammerhead.)Tonight I showed Alex some more photos of the baby elephant at the Maryland Zoo. She wanted to see more, so I offered to look for YouTube videos of baby elephants.
Then she joined the topic of elephants to her current favorite fantasy-play subject, and asked me to find a video of an elephant going to the veterinarian. With the beauty of YouTube, it took me about five seconds to find a fascinating, non-gory, six-minute video of a bull elephant undergoing a tusk-ectomy at the Oregon Zoo. We went on to watch a video of elephants swimming in a river at an animal sanctuary, and then branched out to other animals visiting the vet. (I've just bookmarked this video of a random litter of Norwegian kittens at their first vet visit, amd this one of a litter of Rottweiler puppies, to show her tomorrow.)
I know that nothing beats giving a preschooler real experiences in the real world, and that YouTube isn't a substitute for that. And I know that for real information, books are a much better bet. But damn - if I can find a video of an elephant going to the vet? That means that I can find a video of anything. It's so cool to have a means of instantly satisfying her curiosity.
