Phonics videos my a UK year 1 teacher

There are over 200 free YouTube hosted videos from Mr Thorne, a year 1 primary school teacher in the UK, that can help parents with English, reading, spelling, and early literacy for their children. The videos should be engaging enough to hold the attention of four, five and six year olds.

Smories – Children’s stories read by children

What is Smories? Well put simply it’s a brilliant idea. Lots of young children love having stories read to them. They also like having stories read to them by other children; you might have seen siblings reading to one another, or making up stories for each other. Well that is the basis for Smories – video recordings of children reading stories.

If you’ve got a story for children you can submit it and if its good then one of the many narrators is filmed reading it. Simple as that.

If you’ve got kids then point them towards the site and let them go.

The idea for the site came from a couple with children on a long, long car journey. That’s why the site is also accessible from iPhones and the iPod Touch, so you can get a story where ever and whenever you (or more significantly your kids) want to. It would be nice to see if integration and access is as easy from other portable devices, I haven’t checked that yet.

But with a constant stream of new material, they’re aiming for 50 new stories a month, Smories is a place to keep returning to again and again.

Smories is a UK site a month in so currently all narrators are british with UK accents. The intention is to have more US narrators from August.

Kahn Academy

I have to take my hat off to Sal Kahn for a truly immense resource. What he has achieved with the Kahn Academy is nothing short of incredible.

He’s single handedly generated 1000+  instructional videos covering subjects including:

• Economics
• Finance
• Chemistry
• Arithmetic
• Pre-algebra
• Algebra
• Geometry
• Biology
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Statistics
• Probability
• Calculus
• Differential Equations
• History
• Linear Algebra
• Physics

What a wealth of information. This has to be place in the category alongside Academic Earth and Udemy.

LabTV – Science and Engineering Videos

LabTV online by the National Defense Education Program (NDEP) has some interesting videos about science and engineering for older kids. There are over 50 videos from two seasons of webisodes, helping to capture kids’ imaginations and instill an interest in engineering.

MathTV

The site MathTV.com is brilliant on a number of levels. Firstly, if you’re a student and you want some area of maths explained via a simple, understandable video instruction then look no further. Areas covered are broken down into the topics Calculus, Trig, Algebra and Basic Maths, and then broken down further into multiple sub-topics. With many of the problems there are videos available by different presenters, come in languages other than English, including Spanish. To access these videos you don’t even need to register and log in. What could be simpler?

Additional to all that, if you are a maths tutor and you are wanting to set up a programme of maths to help with your students’ studies, you can create what is called a ‘Playlist’. You do need to register to access this facility, but the registration and login processes are simple and quick; as is the setting up of a playlist. Once your playlist is created, you are provided with a URL to access it, which you can pass on to your students.

Daniel Kopsas has created a screencast tutorial explaining how to set up a MathTV playlist.

Science Bob’s experiments

Science Bob is this guy with what looks like a tie-dyed lab coat. He has some simple, effective science experiments. There are instructions about how to recreate the experiments; some accompanied by videos. Also there are explanations of the science.

Water Bottle Rocket

A couple of years ago I saw a video that capture my interest in creating a water rocket to demonstrate how Newton’s Laws act, hence how a rocket works, and have a bit of fun in the process. Over the intervening period, I forgot about it again, until recently when I came across another example on a BBC television programme, Bang goes the theory (I’ll return to this in a later post).

The latter version of the rocket is somewhat simpler in design, and can easily be recreated.

The original example I now remembered was a bit more involved as a project, and takes a little longer to create. I dug out my early Make Magazines from the garage and found the instructions in there. You can also access them online.

1. Easier design

This is an informative page about the principles, and how to recreate the design with a video embedded.

2. More involved design

This design takes a little more time and effort, and leads to a more ‘explosive’ result.

These are the online instructions from the Make Magazine volume 5 that I’ve got. This is Steve Lodefink’s original design, and there is a video of Steve firing his rocket.

A later instructional video, by Kip Kay is less successful with the rocket, but gives you some pointers.

Additional

You can even have water rocket parties, where you get the kids to decorate their rocket how they want, before launching them, as demonstrated in this finkbuilt post.

Exploratorium: the museum of science, art and human perception

Based in San Francisco, the Exploratorium was founded by the famous physicist and educator Dr Frank Oppenheiner, who remained the director until his death in 1985.

I’ll be visiting the site again, and again and probably again; it’s got to great stuff on there.

However, today I’m interested in the After School section, which “brings hands on activities and digital library resources into afterschool play”.

There are well presented instructional videos telling you how to create the activity, how to engage children in the activity, and how to vary things and investigate the results.

How things work – Science videos

I came across these videos when I was looking out how a trebuchet works (as I mentioned previously). These are a series of videos on YouTube presented by “Steve Jones an experienced mathematics and science teacher”. As you can see from the screenshot they cover nuclear energy, Richter scale, electricity generators, and a few others.

Hilaroad – science, engineering, electronic projects

I came across this site accidentally (whilst investigating trebuchets I clicked a link and ended up there), and boy am I glad I did. The site is called Hilaroad.com and has lots of projects to try, with instructions and video. It look very good.