Guest Blog: Teaching Seasons

BrainPOP Jr. was a huge help to our second grade students learning about the seasons. We began the lesson by reading the book On the Same Day in March, by Marilyn Singer to the class. Then we watched the BrainPOP Jr. movie on Seasons. The book is now one of the suggested books that accompany each BrainPOP Jr. movie for the Seasons movie. We found a class in New Zealand that is at the exact same southern latitude as we are northern latitude in Maine. We used weather.com to find the hours of day and night in each place and plotted them on an Excel graph. The children learned that the day in New Zealand and the night in Maine are almost exactly the same length. We showed them the Seasons movie several times throughout the course of the year. The children showed more understanding each time, so by sometime in February, they were able to predict that the lines of the graph would come together on the first day of spring. We were so excited because then we knew they were really understanding the concept we were teaching them. As an extra really fun thing, using e-Pals, we found a class in New Zealand in our latitude and exchanged several videos of our classes using VoiceThread. We had such fun and learned a lot. BrainPOP Jr. really helped make this lesson possible.