Fun Websites
Add comment December 24th, 2007
Winter break is awesome; you’re out of school, and then Santa comes. Unfortunately, there’s always that chance that you’ll be forced to clean the house or shovel snow. To avoid being stuck in that situation, we recommend accessing a computer and “studying” (though we’re never lying when we say we’re doing that, mom.) We’ve assembled a list of great “studying” sites to occupy your time.
The first website is semi-educational, but not as bad as being actually educational. We know you’re on break and you want to give your brain some down time, but Free Rice is a fun way to help poverty-stricken families all over the world. Major corporations, like Macy’s, have sponsored this vocabulary-based website and for every word you correctly match with its synonym, they donate 20 grains of rice to a needy family. 20 grains is not a lot, but if you get caught up in the game (which you will), the rice really adds up. We’ve found that if we think of the levels of Free Rice as levels on a video game and grains of rice as points, it helps us feel a little better about out video-game challenged selves. Plus, you learn big words to annoy your friends or impress your teachers!
The next online activity isn’t so necessary right after Christmas, but it’s still an option. Online shopping is a great way to waste both time and money, but it’s still a favorite past time. Most clothing stores have websites to buy their clothes from, so you can shop at stores not located near Rockford like Nordstrom, Delia’s, and Forever 21. Also, Zappos.com offers a great shoe selection and the best part is they usually have free overnight shipping. Some websites allow you to email not-so-subtle hints to family and friends about gifts you might enjoy in the future. Wouldn’t that have made Christmas a lot easier?
Youtube is becoming hugely popular. The number of entertaining videos grows daily. Some of our favorites are the SNL cartoon Maraka and Laguna Biotch, a mockery of the popular MTV reality show Laguna Beach. Plus, you can watch a number of TV shows and see your favorite musician’s music videos. Now is the perfect time to stop being left out and successfully master Crank That, if you haven’t already. If these kids can do it, so can you.
To all college kids, if you have not joined Facebook yet, you have incredibly strong will power and we commend you. We have yet to meet a college student without a Facebook profile, and the high school students without it are growing fewer. For those who don’t know, Facebook is a networking site where you use your personal profile to post information like your favorite movies, quotes, pictures, and communicate with your friends in a relatively public way. It’s better than Myspace because of the more organized look and better privacy settings, though there are some pretty stupid applications now involving things like werewolves and pirates. Yeah, we don’t get it either.
These days, the internet is becoming even more popular and useful. We have included a few websites that we enjoy, but we know there are millions of other entertaining ones out there. Let us know of your favorites and try out some of ours. Merry Christmas everyone!
[Disclaimer: We do not condone lying to parents in any way to avoid helping them, which we know you all want to do because you’re good kids.]
