Brain Pop & Brain Pop, Jr – GREAT Educational online sites

Posted by Jenny Mannion On February - 3 - 2008 ADD COMMENTS

I recently came across Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr and afterward spent an hour with my 4 year old daughter exploring Brain Pop Jr. These sites have been winning awards since 2001 and are well worth checking out. They have many activities and videos for free and a subscription service for access to everything on their sites. Schools, libraries, media centers and parents can use them for education and fun combined. Here is the summary from Brain Pop‘s site telling you “Who They Are“:

BrainPOP (http://www.brainpop.com is a pioneering developer of engaging, animated content that motivates and inspires children to learn. Each month, BrainPOP welcomes more than 1,000,000 visitors to its websites, reaching roughly 13,000,000 students in homes, classrooms and computer labs worldwide.
Hosted by an expressive orange robot named Moby and his teen companion Tim, BrainPOP movies cover everything from the Underground Railroad to the atomic model to Shakespeare. Interactive quizzes for assessment and enrichment materials like experiments and creative activities supplement the movies. Topics – aligned with state and national education standards and searchable by state standards – are grouped within the subjects of Science, Math, English, Social Studies, Health, Technology and Arts and Music. Our ever-expanding library currently consists of more than 600 movies for grades 3-12. Designed to spark children’s inherent curiosity, the movies are visually appealing, cleverly written and speak to kids in a voice they can relate to, but without talking down to them. All movies are closed-captioned and many are also available in Spanish at es.brainpop.com.

Brain Pop Jr. is from PreK – 3rd Grade where as BrainPop is From Kindergarten through Grade 12. You can sign up for a free test drive to see all the sites have to offer for 5 days so you can decide whether or not you would want a paid membership.

Brain Pop Jr. offers lots of GREAT learning games. They include games of memorization, logic, puzzles and also games where you can play together and act out clues. Some of my daughter’s favorites were the camouflage game, the seasons game (although we did not find it necessary to print out the worksheet in order to play) and the caring for pets game.

Brain Pop is a great resource for kids. My son is in third grade when all the standardized testing begins in NY State. He has a test in 4 days on the desert (16 pages of single spaced notes to memorize). I was able to go online at Brain Pop (with my free trial membership) and get a video on deserts. It had A LOT of the material he needs to know for the test put into a story so it is more understandable than just memorizing notes.

I really like Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr. and highly recommend checking them out. I am currently debating opting for the paid membership because it is such an exceptional site.

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