Email is a way for people to send written messages to each other online. To read an email, you go to your email account (like Gmail or Outlook) and sign in with your password. Your inbox shows a list of messages, and you click on one to open and read it.
Help children log into an email account. Show them the inbox with received emails. Click on one together and read it, pointing out the sender's name and the message.
Email works a lot like a digital post office. When someone sends you a message, it travels across the internet — which you already know how to connect to — and lands in your inbox, a kind of personal mailbox that belongs to your email address. Your email address is unique to you (like a home address) and looks like a name followed by "@" and a service name, such as `[email protected]`. When you sign in to a service like Gmail or Outlook, you're unlocking your personal mailbox so you can see what's arrived.
The inbox is just a list. Each row represents one message, and it usually shows you three things at a glance: who sent it (the sender), what the message is about (the subject line), and when it arrived. Unread messages are often bold or highlighted. Clicking on a row opens the full message, where you can read everything the sender wrote. This is the same navigation pattern you've already used in a web browser — clicking to go deeper, using the back button to return to the list.
Not everything in your inbox belongs there. Email services automatically sort some incoming messages — advertising, newsletters, or suspected scams — into separate folders like Spam or Junk. That's why an important message might seem to disappear: it was sorted away from your main inbox. It's worth checking those folders if you're expecting something that hasn't arrived.
One important safety habit: check the sender's actual email address before clicking any link in a message. The sender's name you see displayed (like "Amazon") can be anything the sender types — but the real email address (shown in parentheses or when you hover) reveals where the message actually came from. A message claiming to be from a bank but arriving from a random address like `[email protected]` is almost certainly fake. This is called spoofing — when someone disguises who they are — and recognizing it is one of the most practical digital skills you can build early.