Category: Video

Arts & Crafts, Video

The Magic Horse

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Have you ever heard of Charlotte (Lotte) Reiniger? She was one of the foremost pioneers of hand-cut paper silhouette animation, and produced the very first full length animated feature in Germany in 1923. Her work is finely detailed and truly amazing and captivates young viewers.

The Magic Horse is a beautiful example of Reiniger’s paper silhouette animation. This short film (10 minutes) made in 1953 is a delightful adaptation of the Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Watch it below, or if the video below does not show up on your device, click here to view it on Youtube.

Video, Video Lessons

WatchKnowLearn

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WatchKnowLearn is a super-directory of over 50,000 free educational video links that are organized by subject matter, including language arts, math, science, history, social studies, and much more. The depth and scope of the collection is amazing, and it’s homeschool-friendly too!

From the site:

The Vision behind WatchKnowLearn is simple: To provide a world-class, online domain on which educators can store, categorize, and rate the best, K – 12 educational videos on the Internet today. And to make this service FREE so teachers, parents and students everywhere may have access to those videos.

To make this a reality, we invite teachers, instructors and educators to suggest videos for inclusion into our directory, and then to review, approve, and assign those videos into appropriate categories using a wiki framework and philosophy. The videos are the highest quality found on the Internet, cover all major educational topics from elementary to secondary schools (or age range 1 – 18), and are Kid Safe because they are vetted by teachers.

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

 

Holidays, Living Books, Video

A Christmas Carol (the best animated version ever!)

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A Christmas Carol (streaming video)

Here is one of the spookiest, most faithful adaptations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” ever. Richard Williams’ beautifully-executed animated version of Charles Dickens’ timeless seasonal parable won the 1972 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, but to this day has yet to receive a DVD release anywhere. And that is such a shame! This is an amazing adaptation of Dickens’ story, an animation tour-de-force based on the original book illustrations from early editions of Dickens’ book. It is beautifully done, and captures aspects of the original that other dramatizations of this classic story have missed. 25 minutes long, and HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Parents, be warned this is genuinely spooky in some spots (as is the original story), so some of this might be frightening to very young children. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Science, Video, Video Lessons

YouTube Science Channels for Kids

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YouTube is a great source of educational materials  – especially if you are looking for science and experiments videos. Here are 15+ different YouTube channels specializing in science videos for kids, as collected on the STEM learning site, i-gamemom.com. From geology to outer space, animals, hands-on experiments, and more, there are hundreds of videos on these channels covering just about any science topic you can think of.

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

Just for Fun, Video

The Fumbletons

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By popular demand, here’s an encore presentation of THE FUMBLETONS videos by Jess Erskine (creator of CrunchyBunny.com). Each short 2-3 minute video offers up a cool (and actually useful!) household tip wrapped up in the adventures of a slightly eccentric  family, all played by Jess Erskine. If you haven’t seen these before, you are in for a treat! They just get better and better as you go through them!

CLICK HERE to go the the YouTube playlist of all nine episodes!

 

Physics, Science, Video

Random Experiments from The King of Random

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“Welcome to a world of garage science and backyard experimenting. This page is all sciencey guy stuff .. but girls can play too!”

Here’s a delightfully geeky Facebook video channel with over 70 fun and interesting videos from, with all sorts of “garage science” experiments, inventions, and science — including making waterproof sand, all sorts of colored smokes, slime, a smoke ring cannon, a David & Goliath sling, a T-shirt cannon, melting marbles with electricity, and lots more.

Most of these are NOT suitable for most homeschoolers to try for themselves, as they involve some hazardous chemicals, fire, etc. and are really meant for older experimenters. However, they are full of fun ideas and plenty of science (which is usually fully explained by the very likeable, good natured hosts), and just may pique your student’s interest in physics, chemistry and science.

(We also didn’t spot anything off-color or objectionable on the videos we watched, but then we did not watch all 71 of the videos. You may want to preview some of the more off-the-wall experiments if they freak you out.)

CLICK HERE to go to their Facebook video channel.