Welcome to the Whizzbots site
Welcome to our website
The aim of this website is to provide a site to help children become independent and active learners, whether that is in school or they are home learning. The whole site has been designed for kids to use, and to be appealing for young children in its look and layout. The information has been written also for young children in mind. While it has been set up to provide accessible information and resources for Key Stage One children primarily it will hopefully also prove helpful in some places for EYFS and Key Stage Two children too. I am an experienced Key Stage One and Early Years teacher and have created the site based on years of teaching Year 1 and 2 children through a cross curricular creative curriculum.
The content has been developed from a previous site that I made using a website builder, which I started in 2014 and developed over about six years. I have spent a further four years adapting and developing the idea further, creating the Whizzbots in 2020 and starting to transfer the content over to this new wordpress site in 2021. All in between teaching and looking after my young children, so it has been a much slower process than I would like!
I’m learning as I go building the site, it is still very much under construction and being improved as I learn more. It’s been a very steep learning curve! While I have been improving and changing things you may find things that don’t look quite right, I’ve broken things while redoing them in a different way, the backgrounds and some of the layouts on tablets and mobile in particular. I’m working on going back through and changing things as I go but the content itself should be ok.
The Blog and Links sections are up and running, while still being added to and improved. The content for the Topics section is all there, but is currently still being transferred over and adapted from the old site. Hopefully this will be all completed during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Whizzbots Topics
The main focus of the site is the Topics area, which will be accessible through membership to the site. I love teaching through topics, they can inspire and motivate children to learn and be interested in the world around them. But for many topics I found it hard to find accessible online content suitable for young children, that was easy for them to read and understand as well as navigate without a lot of support. I also had to find multiple sites to find sufficient information for a topic which made it even harder for the children to explore the information with some independence. There is definitely more out there now than when I first started the site, but hopefully there is room for the Whizzbots too!
I have set out the information pages with young children in mind making the pages colourful and bright, with plenty of pictures and information that is appropriate for them, set out and explained in a simple way.
At the end of each page there is an even simpler review section, recapping the main facts covered and a quiz to check their understanding of what they have just read.
Finally each page has a questions section. We always start a topic with what the children already know and what they’d like to find out about. I’d love children to be able to ask question if I haven’t answered something they wanted to find out about.
Whizzbots Blog
As well as the Topics area there is the Whizzbots Blog, which is free to access. Here you will find blog posts focussing on the same topics. The Whizzbots Adventures explore great places to visit related to the topics. Show and Tell posts give you ideas on activities that might be of interest. Events and Celebrations that relate to our topics are sometimes covered and if anything happens in the news related to the topics that will feature too.
Text to Speech
I use text to speech for my children to access the information on the website easily, it is a great tool for younger children and brilliant for dyslexics. I really wanted to add TTS straight on to the website but can’t find any suitable options affordable currently.
Children respond really well to TTS, especially if the text is highlighted as it is read out loud, and I find it really helps them take the information in. They also learn how to do this surprisingly fast!
Read Aloud on Microsoft Edge
The easiest option is to use the Microsoft Edge browser to explore the Whizzbots site. They have an inbuilt text to speech tool called Read Aloud. There are no downloads, extensions or sign ins required, it just works. It does exactly what I wanted to add straight to the site, another reason why I can’t justify adding it just yet! The children can just click the Read Aloud icon in the address bar or right click anywhere on the information page they want to read and choose the option Read Aloud. The TTS will then read the information out loud to the children and highlight the line it is on and the word it is reading so they can follow along with the information. You can download the Microsoft Edge browser here if you don’t have it.
Natural Reader or Speechify on Google Chrome
The best option I have found so far on the Chrome browser is to add an extension, Natural Reader and Speechify are the ones I’d recommend. These two extensions can also be added to other browsers too and can also be used on Google Docs which is helpful!
Once the extension is added Natural Reader can be activated by either choosing the extension on the toolbar or by highlighting the text you want to read and choosing the headphones icon that appears. It will then read it out loud and highlight one sentence at a time and the word it is reading so it is very easy to follow along. Premium voices come at a price but the free ones work automatically. (On Google Docs the highlighting is not quite as good, as it only highlights the line it is reading, not the word too.)
To use Speechify you will have to create a free account to activate it after installing the extension. Like Natural Reader to get premium voices you have to upgrade but it works for free too. It can be used by choosing the extension in the toolbar or by just clicking on th floating play button which will appear when you hoover over any text on the site. It will highlight a sentence at a time and highlight the word being read too so you can follow along. You can also highlight part of the text you want it to read and then right click, choosing Read Selection. (This is really good on Google Docs, it highlights the sentence and word being read so it’s easier to follow along.)
Whizzbots Links
And finally there is the Links page, which links to many fabulous websites, providing interactive games to support children’s English, Phonics and Maths Learning. Each page focusses on a broad objective covered in Year 1 and 2, so children can explore resources focussed on the objective they are learning about. It also includes video suggestions and other content to help extend the children’s topic research.
These Whizzbots Links areas will always be free as they are not my content and are just my recommendations on sites I have always used with my children successfully. Each link will take you to the creators website, please explore the rest of these websites, they are really good and I would recommend subscribing to their paid for content as it is definitely worth it!