Teaching kids HTML is a great way to introduce them to the world of programming. The language is relatively simple to understand, but can be challenging to put into practice. HTML classes can help your child master this standardized system and set them up for success with more complex coding and programming languages

What Is HTML?

Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is a series of tags used to create websites.These tags tell the internet browser how to display content on a webpage. For example, if you label words with the tag <p>, your internet browser understands that the text should be displayed as a paragraph. HTML code is responsible for about 90% of the websites you visit. Almost the entire internet is written in HTML!

HTML is not a programming language. However, everything you learn with HTML can carry over to actual programming languages like Java, C++, and Python. Learning HTML is an important introduction into coding and programming languages, and having this skill will be beneficial to your child in the future. 

[Read: Python Code for Kids]

If your child wants to learn HTML, they’ll need a guide with simple language to make it easy to understand even the most difficult of concepts. Knowing the basics yourself will help you support your child as they learn.

HTML Code For Kids: The Most Important Tags

Every command in HTML is made inside these symbols: < >. Be sure to write ALL tags using lower case letters. When the command is complete, close it out by including a ‘/’ in your brackets, like this: </p>

There are 5 main tags in HTML. Once your child knows all 5 of these tags, they’ll be ready to make their own website.

  1. The <html> tag.

This is the tag you put at the beginning and end of an HTML file. This tells your internet browser that it’s interpreting HTML code. This is what starts the entire HTML coding process, and it must be included when building a site using HTML language. 

  1. The <title> tag.

This tag labels the text that’s supposed to go in the title bar or the browser window. It determines the title of the page as viewed in searches, and gives potential visitors a summary of the content of your page, helping to drive traffic to a site.

  1. The <body> tag. 

This tag contains all of the content that you want to show the reader. It defines the visual content of the webpage, such as text, hyperlinks, charts, and images that visitors see when they access the page. This is the core of your HTML file.

  1. The <p> tag

This is the paragraph tag. It allows you to control where new paragraphs start in the text of your webpage. 

  1. The <head> tag. 

This tag is the head of your HTML file. It’s going to contain all the information (metadata) about a website, such as a title, meta tags, content types, links, CSS, and JavaScript.  

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These 5 tags build websites. HTML also allows for nested tags- the ability to put tags within tags. These are usually content tags. They allow you to give a piece of text more features by controlling the display of the text, like determining its font size, color, and whether it should be in bold or italics.

HTML Coding For Kids: The Practical Way

HTML for Kids

If you want to see the HTML details of a webpage, right-click on the page, and then choose ‘view source’. This allows anyone to see how a page was built. Before there were books and classes available, the only way for the average person to master HTML was to copy the tags from a website and experiment on their own.The transparency and accessibility of HTML is what made it so popular. Anyone with an inquisitive mind could look at the language to understand and learn coding.

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Today, there are website-creating tools that can take your normal text and convert it into HTML, which means knowing HTML isn’t mandatory to build a website. However, tools have limitations, so knowing HTML yourself is still the best way to ensure you can make your website look exactly how you want it to look.

Even if your child is taking an HTML class, they’ll probably only learn the basics. Showing your child how to access a website’s source code so they can imitate the HTML features they like can help them develop further coding skills. 

Learning HTML from classes, books, or instructional videos is easy, but sometimes learning by experimenting and copying the experts is more engaging and rewarding. 

What Can My Kid Do With HTML?

The results are immediate when using HTML, which allows your child to learn through trial and error. After they become familiar with the HTML basics, children can move on to more advanced HTML tagging strategies. Teaching HTML to kids can provide a solid foundation for learning the coding skills that will help them master other programming languages as well.

For example, once a child learns HTML, they can easily master CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. CSS makes websites look beautiful. All the alignments of content, flexibility, and colors that you see on a website are designed with the help of CSS. These tutorials are a bit more advanced, but you’ll usually see them advertised side by side with HTML tutorials because the two go together. CSS is not as easy to learn as HTML, but it can be especially rewarding if your child is artistically inclined and likes designing things.

[Read: CSS Code for Kids]

Conclusion

HTML is intuitive and beginner-friendly. HTML classes for kids can be fun, easy, and interesting for any child that wants to learn about building websites.

You don’t need to invest a lot of time learning HTML to be able to create a simple website, and everything you learn typically transfers over to other languages really well.

There are lots of ways to teach your child HTML, but enrolling them into HTML classes is a good start. Encourage them to experiment on their own as well by using the ‘view source’ command on their internet browser, and they’ll be building websites in no time!  

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