What are packets?

A packet is like a small envelope that carries a piece of your message across the internet.

Imagine you're sending a letter to your friend at school, but instead of writing the whole letter on one sheet of paper and putting it in one envelope, you write parts of it on different pieces of paper and put each part into its own little envelope. Each little envelope is a packet, they all have your message inside them, but just a piece of it.

Think of the internet like a long toy tunnel. When you want to send a message from one end of the tunnel to the other, you break it up into small pieces, these are your packets. Each packet goes through the tunnel on its own, sometimes taking different paths, and then they all come out at the other end. Your friend (or computer) puts them back together so you can read the whole message again.

This way, even if one of the little envelopes gets lost or takes a detour, the others still make it through, and your message is still delivered!