Next month, Kailee turns eight-years old. She's getting to be a good reader, but she's really a social creature. She loves, loves, loves to talk, and she's very artistic. So for her birthday, I think I'm going to give her a blog. A Radio blog, to be specific. Here's my reasoning, in no particular order.

1. Radio makes it eight-year old easy. Typing in a box and pressing a button is perfect for someone my age, let alone her age.
   
2. It will help her continue to learn spelling and grammar, while motivating her to look up words in the dictionary. We can use it to teach her to think through her thoughts before posting them.
   
3. I've already registered her domain name because she wanted a Web site, but I was going to have to act like a funnel and put her stories, pictures, etc. on the Web for her. This lets her do it herself, which should be a point of pride for her. Of course, we'll totally monitor everything she posts, but it will also help maintain her current interest in computers and the Net.
   
4. Letting her post her own pages will show her how easy it is to post anything on the Web, which will go a long way towards teaching her information literacy. For example, last week we argued with her because she saw a site that listed her brother's Chinese sign as "Pig." We tried to explain it was the year of the pig and that he wasn't literally a pig, but she just kept saying, "Well, that's what the site said." So if she sees Web publishing for herself, I think she'll be much more critical of what she reads elsewhere. And that's a "good thing."
   
5. With the new rssDistiller tool, she can subscribe to some of the kids sites, which will help her learn how to channel information.
   

6. And finally, we can totally embarass her at her wedding with posts from when she a kid.  :-)