Sean D’Abbraccio just posted a helpful flipchart on Promethean Planet. He uses the BrainPOP characters from the BrainPOP Resource Pack to help review test prep strategies.

Description: This flipchart uses the BrainPOP characters to give students tips for the grade 3 MCAS reading test. It could also be used for any standardized reading comprehension test prep. There is a quick Activote assessment at the end.

Promethean Planet has a ton of BrainPOP flipcharts!

Are you using BrainPOP on an interactive whiteboard? Share your ideas by posting below!

As part of Women’s History Month, a new holiday called Ada Lovelace Day is being celebrated on March 24th. Lovelace, a contemporary of the inventor Charles Babbage, is often credited as being the world’s first computer programmer! If you have a classroom blog, why not have your students write and publish a post about an inspiring woman in the field of technology? The good people at Findingada.com are collecting such blog posts as a way to encourage girls and women to pursue science and technology careers. In the meantime, you can read our FYI on Ada Lovelace and check out our Women’s History Spotlight to learn about some other inspirational ladies!

BrainPOP is supporting the San Diego Science Festival 2009 with some fantastic online resources on KidZone, a fun resource for budding scientists!  Explore educational animated movies, experiments, quizzes, comics, and interactive activities! You’ll also find some special promotions for a limited time. 

For complete information on the festival, visit SDScienceFestival.org.

Giving a workshop on BrainPOP or BrainPOP Jr? We are happy to offer free professional development materials, including presentation outlines, handouts, and more.

Anything else you’d like to see here? Please post suggestions below!

How amazing is this? Arlington, Virginia 2nd Grade Teacher, Ms. Schneider, invites her students to follow along via her blog and videoconferencing as she treks to the Arctic’s Edge to research climate change. She used BrainPOP to build students’ background knowledge.

We’re thrilled to be included in this adventure and encourage you to check out her website and follow along on the adventure!

Have you used BrainPOP to prepare students for field trips or travel? Try it and let us know about it by posting comments below!

BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. value the input of our advisors, who review our content and works closely with our writers and animators to create a fun and educational resource. We are currently looking for K-3 teachers specializing in Social Studies and Health for BrainPOP Jr., and Math and Physical Science for BrainPOP.

If you are interested, please read more about what being an Advisor entails and apply here! You can also read about our current Advisory board.

BrainPOP Educators is running a poll this month! Vote now on which notable woman BrainPOP should make a movie on next! It’s fun checking on the results and reading comments! Keep ‘em coming! We will announce the results at the end of the month.

How are you using BrainPOP’s Spotlight on Women’s History? Please post comments below!

Covering topics from jazz, country, and Latin music to Elvis Presley, Louis Armstrong, and Beethoven, BrainPOP’s Spotlight: Music sounds like a great idea! The Spotlight’s featured quiz and free topic is 60s folk music, while BrainPOP Educators offers a lesson plan on writing folk songs. For the K-3 set, there’s BrainPOP Jr.’s Sound movie.

BrainPOP honors Women’s History Month with Spotlight: Women’s History, dedicated to feminism, suffrage, and famous females like Frida Kahlo, Helen Keller, Judy Blume, Marie Curie, Pocahontas, and many others. Check out a featured quiz and free topic on Jane Goodall!

BrainPOP Educators wants to know what YOU think. In support of Women’s History Month, we’re running a new poll: tell us which notable woman you’d like to see featured in a BrainPOP movie. Choose from Rosa Parks, Sacajawea, Sophie Germain, Jane Austen, Clara Barton, Martha Graham, and Elizabeth Blackwell. Vote now!

Rarely do we have a group of students that don’t require differentiating instruction to some degree. I’ve been collecting ideas on how easy it is to differentiate using BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. over the past few months. Here are some to play around with!

*Use the Hard/Easy Quiz options in BrainPOP Jr.  Students can work in small groups, partnerships, or individually to complete the quiz best suited for them before and/or after watching the movie.

*PRINT the quiz and share it with students who might be slower to respond or need some extra processing time before taking the quiz as a class, so they can prepare to participate successfully.

*Practice reading through the movie using the closed captioning to help students practice fluency and expression. Then, watch the movie without sound and let students do the talking!

*Give students who need it extra opportunities to watch the movie to help with processing all the information packed in there! You can also provide them with printed copies of all of our interactive features to reinforce class activities.

*Struggling writers can type their answers directly into the Activity Pages or dictate to a buddy, allowing them to free up their ideas instead of getting frustrated on paper.

*PAUSE! Break the movies into smaller, more manageable chunks, and revisit the same movie multiple times.

Are you using BrainPOP or BrainPOP Jr. for differentiating instruction? Please post below and share your experiences!