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My daughter is four and a half and I have an old work laptop built up for her. She's got some good mousing skills and scored an OCD ranking in one World of Goo level while I was doing the washing up.

Anyway....I've scoured around trying to find good content and have a good list. Steer clear of all the Disney and other commerical stuff, that stuff will rot their brains. It's also badly coded and mainly a vehicle to advertise to the kids.

This is what I have installed on her laptop. They are all links to flash sites as almost all good kids stuff is on-line now. Anything that you have to install probably lists Windows ME as the system requirement on the box:

1) Poisson Rouge (http://www.poissonrouge.com/) - This is a French/English flash site with has no instructions and just encourages the child to explore the pages and work out what to do. It's probably the best site on-line for the 3-5 age group.

2) Boowah & Kwala (http://boowakwala.uptoten.com/) - This is another French/English site originally made by a husband and wife for their daughter and has grown from there. It's more instructional in its activities, but has an enormous amount of content delivered in a great way. The two main characters (see the names) are voiced by the parents and are very funny.

3) Sesame Street (http://www.sesamestreet.org/) - This one is a no-brainer...they have a great variety of games for different ages.

4) StarFall (http://www.starfall.com/) – A reading site that runs from letter recognition all the way to full reading. It’s got some very fun stuff in it.

5) WordWorld (http://pbskids.org/wordworld/index_flash.html) – A very rich and interactive reading site with lots of fun characters made out of letters.

Enjoy!

You may just have had an advantage from natural talent and experience? Or maybe you just eat a better diet or exercise more than others?
    http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html

You can see another post I made for links about alternative education.
    http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34081206

But basically, most young children tend to learn best through interactions with people, nature, exposure to a waide variety of experiences including music and stories, and basic things like playing with sand, water, and blocks. It is on those sorts of things that more advanced thinking is built. Trying to put the cart before the horse may lead to less success, not more. It has been hypothesized that the reason many kids are doing worse in math and science and criticial thinking is that those sorts of general early experiences have been curtailed in favor of early academics focusing on things like early print literacy or early drill of math concepts. So, you might want to research this more, including reading stuff by John Holt (a mathematical person who also studied alternative education).
    http://holtgws.com/

With that said, there are things you can do, like pointing out things. I've pointed out examples of recursion to my kid from a young age (like trucks carrying trucks). And math has been a daily thing by pointing out examples of it in our daily life, including when working with LEGOs. But that is not the same as "lessons" in any kind of formal sense.

A good open-ended site for young kids to learn through play as an example:
    http://www.poissonrouge.com/

I agree with you that programming is a good way to approach math. As people talked about on the Python edusig list, "math" can really just be seen as a subset of computation and programming in general (at least within the bounds of whatever most schools teach).

I can also wonder if getting kids indoors more at an early age has made them vitamin D deficient which has led to some learning difficulties? So, even if you use computers with a kid a lot, make sure that everyone is getting enough vitamin D.
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

I want to wholeheartedly agree with this, even as I posted another comment about compulsory school being bad for most kids in many ways. With my own child, since and early age, and following some of John Holt's suggestions, and those of other "unschoolers", I've been making numbers part of our every day existence, counting things we handle and so on. As a computer programmer, I point out recursion whenever we see it as nested items (like tow trucks towing tow trucks, or cups inside cups). I agree that parents need to have an awareness of this and can contribute very much (in a non-forced off-hand way). Another point Holt makes is to see that something like 2 + 2 = 4 is essentially the same "fact" as 4 = 2 = 2 and 2 * 2 = 4 and 4 / 2 = 2, something not taught or understood in many schools' approach to math education, where different operations are taught in different years. Also, there are a lot of resources now on the internet to learn math in fun way or at your own pace. For younger kids, here is one:
    http://www.poissonrouge.com/
For older kids, another:
    http://www.khanacademy.org/

Please see this book (and my other previous comment here):
    http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X

I wrote a review of it here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html

Other related books about general issues and about what has been done to girls via media (and poor nutrition):
    http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
    http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

And something every caregiver should know now that kids spend a lot of time indoors and have become vitamin D deficient:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

We got rid of broadcast TV long ago too (we do use DVDs like Mr. Rogers and nature videos, and selected YouTube).

While I don't recommend any screen media for younger kids if you can avoid it, this site is pretty good for age four:
    http://www.poissonrouge.com/

As is this:
    http://www.starfall.com/

For older ages, some good things are:
    http://www.learner.org/
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.cosmolearning.com/

A caregiver needs to create a safe nurturing environment within a child's needs and abilities. You are doing the right thing.

Other useful links:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
    http://www.motherstyles.com/

Here is an on-line interactive site my children spent ages playing on: http://www.poissonrouge.com/ Free to use and in english and french.

Web based games (usually in flash) can be fun, especially for the younger kids.

For 2-5 I like www.poissonrouge.com

That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/

And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html

The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp

Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.

But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder

The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.

Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average, :-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.

See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm

John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/

Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm

_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri