Online texts rapidly are becoming central to children's out-of-school literate lives. However, children's engagement with such unofficial texts rarely is addressed in schools, or is addressed in limited ways. To address this gap, we argue for conceptualizing popular media, including websites, as the new literatures of childhood, tracking how popular websites maintain many of the values of children's literature but extend beyond the genres, purposes, and textual practices commonly discussed in children's literature. Through analyses of cultural models of gender in four popular websites--including cultural models of ideal girls and boys, appropriate activities for each gender, and characterizations of the opposite sex--we illustrate how a literary approach to new media texts can be used to refocus literacy education.