Start planning now! We’re featuring a brand new Spotlight on Book Month for January, including famous authors, great interactive activities, and more! Be sure your students know the basics of writing a Book Report. Learn more about the classic, Frankenstein, our featured free movie, or the more modern adventures of Harry Potter.   You can explore famous authors from Homer to Kurt Vonnegut, and in BrainPOP Jr., Ezra Jack Keats and Cynthia Rylant. Our Winter & Snow Spotlight will stay available through the end of January as well.

Happy New Year!

To welcome you back from vacation, we’ve added a brand new video tutorial that I am super excited about! Check out Note Taking With BrainPOP and see how to take advantage of the Activity Pages and FYIs to teach this important skill to your students. A special thanks to Melissa Farran, 4th grade teacher at PS 261 in Brooklyn, NY, for sharing her expertise and her incredible class with us. Take a look, try it out, and please let me know what you think!

Wishing you a well deserved vacation and the happiest of holidays! We hope you’ve gotten great use out of our Winter & Snow Spotlight. It will also be available in January. We’ve got an exciting new Spotlight for January — stay posted!

Stay warm!

Allisyn & the BrainPOP team

I have been using BrainPOP since its debut in 1999, when I was teaching at an American International School in Hong Kong. Being so far from the US, we were constantly looking for quality resources to integrate into our curriculum to ensure the students attending our school, while their families were stationed overseas, were getting an “American Style” education. When we discovered BrainPOP it quickly became a favorite resource to enrich our teaching.

Now that I am back home in Washington State, I am doing all I can to turn other teachers on to this valuable resource.

My two favorite aspects of BrainPOP are its ability to allow children to explore their curiosity, and my ability to differentiate my curriculum to all levels of understanding in any given lesson.

Inquiry is a focus of my curriculum and students are encouraged to have daily “C.O.W.s” (Connections, Observations or Wonderings). With BrainPOP, the answer to the inevitable September question: “Do we get to learn about _______?” is always “Yes!”. We encourage the natural curiosity of children by allowing them to work on Inquiry Learning Projects focused on their passions and interests. BrainPOP is always a starting point and, many times an ending point as well. The videos often answer the child’s questions without further research or motivate them to dive more deeply into their topic. BrainPOP allows inquiry to flourish as kids explore topics they are interested in with very little planning on my part.

Last year I taught a science block to three classes of gifted fourth graders. While I used the site often to reinforce or review concepts students are struggling with, I found it particularly helpful in differentiating for my more inquisitive scientists. When we were studying mixtures and solutions in chemistry, a student asked about the periodic table. After sending him to BrainPOP, he presented what he’d learned to the class and we ended up having each child “adopt” an element, creating our own periodic table in the lab.

Being able to point students to a resource I trust as much as BrainPOP makes my job much easier and the students learning experience much more personal and rich.
Got a story about using BrainPOP that you’d like to share? Please post comments below!

Kindergarten teacher, Axy Duffell, from Port Orange, Florida, sent us this photo displaying her class assignment on Solids, Liquids, and Gases.  She noted how impressed she was that some of her kindergarteners understood the transference of energy to change states after watching the BrainPOP Jr. movie! Here’s what she did:

I began the lesson with a discussion about changes in matter. I asked a few questions and checked for comprehension. Then, I played the BrainPOP Jr. video on “Changes States of Matter“. I used the “pause cues” and asked questions about the video. Once the video ended, I used the “Draw About It” activity. My students absolutely loved it and immediately began drawing their answers. While they were drawing I went around the classroom asking each student to tell me what they were drawing about.  Once they were done and asked each of my students to come up and present their drawing to the class!

I hope you’ll play around with our BrainPOP clipart and Moby alphabet to make your bulletin boards and BrainPOP activities fun for your students (and easy for you!). You can find these resources on our Just For Fun page.

Thanks for sharing, Axy! Please join Axy and show us what you’re doing with BrainPOP bulletin boards in your classrooms! We’d love to publish it for the world to see on our Bulletin Board!

I am always looking for e-learning products that are useful and will stand the test of time for our school board. So many products come and go, and don’t really address the long-term needs of schools. That is why I am a big fan of BrainPOP, which we have been subscribing to for the past 3 years. Our teachers from K-8 are now all using BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr. to enhance their lessons. It is amazing to see students engaged and getting so much out of these short videos. Many of our teachers also use Promethean ActiVotes with BrainPOP’s Quizzes, which help teachers get a clear picture of student understanding. BrainPOP’s activities, games, word walls, jokes, comics and their new BrainPOP Educators section only enhance an already amazing product.

In my recent book, 6 Steps to Success in Teaching with Technology, and on my e-learning website, www.MrKent.Net, I highlight BrainPOP as one of the top e-teaching tools for K-12. I believe that when teachers Understand Why, Adapt, Plan, Do Their Homework, Implement Effectively and Keep Up to Date with e-learning that not only will they be successful teachers, but students will be successful learners. BrainPOP has fit nicely into this new age of learning and I am looking forward to figuring out new ways to incorporate it into my teaching.

Lucas Kent
Grade 6 Teacher & E-Learning Consultant
Burkevale School
Ontario, Canada

This is so much fun! I just sent a Moby e-card to my best friend in China! The idea of doing BrainPOP e-cards has been in the works for a long time, so it’s exciting to see it up and running! Hope you have fun with it!

Teachnet grants are awarded to New York City public and charter school teachers in grades pre-K through 12 who design outstanding curriculum units that integrate the Internet into an original project for the classroom.

Successful applicants receive $500 and publication on teachersnetwork.org.

Applications Due January 20, 2009.

Consider BrainPOP’s Spotlight: Winter & Snow your seasonal headquarters. You’ll find great content on all-things winter, from movies about Winter Holidays and Mount Everest, to those on Snowflakes and Hibernation. You can also send personalized, free e-cards to your favorite Moby loving friends and family!

Now through January 10th, save 25 percent when you purchase Family or Classroom subscriptions to BrainPOP (grades 3 and up) or BrainPOP Jr. (grades K-3), or Combo subscriptions for your family or classroom (Combo subscriptions include access to both BrainPOP and BrainPOP Jr.). Homeschoolers, you’re also eligible for this discount. Be sure to enter holiday08 as the coupon code.

Finally, check out our easily adaptable lesson plan on Hibernation to kick off your winter studies! Happy December!

Fear not! The resources on Ancient Cultures you’ve been searching for are here!  We are confident that students will love learning about these important cultures from the past with Moby, Tim, and Annie as their tour guides. Start with the Roman Republic Activity Pages before you even watch the movie! These will be perfect to return to for note-taking during the movie and to revise afterwards. Many teachers and parents find it useful to have students take the Quiz before watching the movie as a quick assessment of what they already know. Then jump in! We’ve got your ancient cultures covered, from The Fall of the Roman Empire to  Mesoamerica, and Homer to Cleopatra! We’re featuring the Roman Republic and  Ancient Egypt (from BrainPOP Jr’s Spotlight) as our two free movies in this Spotlight.

Let us know what you do with these resources by posting below or submitting a lesson plan! We’ll even send you a BrainPOP t-shirt if your lesson plan is published!