Guest Blogger: BrainPOP Helps Students “Get It!”

We met a fabulous middle school science teacher at the recent T+L conference in Seattle. Nicole Yemothy teaches in Kent, WA. She was kind enough to share this story with us about how BrainPOP helped while she was away from her students to attend the conference. Read on! And if you’ve got a story to share with us, please post on our blog!

As a Title 1 school, our kids are from a very diverse background, with over 70% low income family on free and reduced lunch. At Mill Creek Middle School in Kent, we have over 11 languages spoken at our school alone. Our kids come from an incredible diverse background as well as educational abilities. This diversity is great for the kids and interpersonal growth but the various learning levels make teaching a daily challenge especially in overcrowded classrooms and tight budgets.

BrainPOP is one of those key programs that help even the learning field in my classroom and at our school. After my attending the Brain POP seminar, I used it in my classroom while I was in at the conference for the second day. The results were amazing. I come home from the first day at the conference to emails from 20% of my kids asking for clarification, help, and re-explanation on their day’s activity on the Atmosphere. Since I could not be in the classroom myself the next day, I “sent” Tim and Moby to my classroom (via a BrainPOP video).

The response was great. The kids enjoyed the presentation and the fun, friendly delivery of the information by Tim and Moby. To assess their immediate comprehension, I asked them to take the online quiz and email the results to me.  When I checked my email mid-day on Wednesday at the conference, I had received quiz grades from over two-thirds my kids with 8s, 9s and even 10s. A few students, who earned a 7 or 8, even went back and took the quiz again to earn a high score of 10.

When I returned to my classroom on Thursday, my students were all too excited to tell me about the BrainPOP video and ask if we can watch another (as we did today). I asked them to email me why or how BrainPOP helped if they wanted to. Their replies were varied from vague to detailed but of all that replied everything was positive. I have included two of my student’s statement for you to hear.

“I liked the Smart Notebook activity, but that didn’t really explain the questions I had, it was kind of practice. The reason I like the BrainPOP video is because they really did explain it the way I wanted them to. They don’t just give me a bunch of info. But they explained in a more organized way. I really am happy with that video, the first time I watched it, it was becoming clear but once I watched it a second time I truly knew what I was doing. J ” – Araceli R., 7th Grade Science

“BrainPop helped me out a lot yesterday. It helped me because when I wanted to type something down on the other webpage, I could just pause the movie and then I could type what I wanted to do. Then I could go back and play the movie again. It also helped me because it told me things that I didn’t even know. It told me why the sky is blue. It also told me that the thermosphere is the hottest layer of the atmosphere. So as you can see, BrainPop helped me a lot.”    Sincerely, Brennan K., 7th Grade Science