What to put on for a five- or six-year-old
At five and six the question changes. It stops being only about what is enjoyable and starts being about what everyone else has seen. That is the age at which a site like this one first starts to chafe, and we would rather say so here than let you find out.
What we do have is the part of the catalog with something to think about in it, and the part that asks for something back rather than just running.
Making something
This is the strongest thing we hold for this age. How to draw runs to sixty videos, with paper involved and something to show at the end — a different kind of half hour from an episode, and one a five-year-old can follow without help.
Knowing things
- Science for kids — forty-five
- The Fixies — a hundred, and about how objects work, which is exactly the question at this age
- History for children — eight
- Countries of the world — seven
The old cartoons, with a caveat
Mr Bean has a hundred, Bugs Bunny a hundred, and Tom and Jerry fifty-four.
Worth being straight about these: the Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry shorts are 1940s slapstick, and the violence in them is constant, comic and consequence-free. Plenty of parents are fine with that and some are not. Five is roughly the age at which a child can tell that an anvil is a joke — but that is a judgement about your child, not about the cartoon.
Where we run out
Our range is narrower here than for toddlers, and not by accident: the older the child, the more of what they are after sits on ordinary YouTube. Every video here is checked before it goes in, and that scales badly against a six-year-old looking for something specific.
What helps without opening the door: My list lets you add channels, clips and playlists yourself. They then sit here, in the same surroundings, with no recommendations alongside them. It is the feature built for exactly this moment.