Teaching Strategies
BrainPOP: More Than a Movie
What POPS into your head when you hear “BrainPOP”? For kids, it’s usually “Moby the robot,” but for teachers it brings to mind short animated movies that help students understand the world around them. Here’s what you may not know: Over the past 20+ years, BrainPOP has grown (and is still growing!) into much more than a content library.
From creative projects that prompt students to think critically and apply new understanding, to playful, game-like assessments, BrainPOP is a rich educational platform that meets students’ varying needs in effective, meaningful, and fun ways!
Wondering what BrainPOP offers beyond the movie? Keep reading to learn about our many tools and features, and how to use them to create lessons that build background knowledge, encourage creative and critical thinking, and assess students’ understanding.
Build Background
Movie
BrainPOP offers close to 900 short animations that explain concepts across the curriculum—from Maya civilization to mindfulness—in ways that are meaningful to kids. Each movie stars the beloved robot, Moby, along with a growing cast of characters.
Navigating to a topic you’re teaching is a cinch!
Related Reading
You’ll discover high-interest informational articles that expand upon every BrainPOP topic. Plus, they provide a perfect opportunity for kids to practice key reading skills!
Apply Understanding
Make-a-Movie
What better or more fun way for students to express their understanding than by making their very own BrainPOP-style movies? Make-a-Movie invites kids to sit in the director’s chair as they build scenes with images and clips from our digital library, record narration, customize backgrounds, and add transitions—all while seamlessly practicing key ELA skills, such as sequencing, summarizing, comparing and contrasting, and more!
See examples of student- and teacher-made movies using Make-a-Movie.
Make-a-Map
Our concept-mapping tool prompts students to exercise higher-order thinking skills as they make connections and form new understanding about the BrainPOP movies they watch. Students can use premade templates or start from scratch as they build concept maps with BrainPOP images, clips, and key vocabulary.
Creative Coding
Don’t know how to code? No problem! Our block- and text-based coding projects include easy, step-by-step tutorials so you can learn to code right alongside your students. You’ll find coding projects right on the topic page, making it a cinch to seamlessly and meaningfully integrate coding into whatever you’re already teaching.
See BrainPOP’s Creative Coding in action at a school in Brooklyn, New York.
Primary Source
Finding appropriate primary sources that tie in to your lessons can be time consuming and expensive. That’s why we’ve done it for you! You’ll discover primary sources for over 200 BrainPOP topics that prompt students to examine, analyze, and interpret photographs, videos, diaries, speeches, and other first-hand artifacts and accounts.
Assess
Quiz & Quiz Mixer
Every BrainPOP topic includes a 10-question multiple choice quiz that goes beyond recall questions to engage students’ higher-order thinking skills. Some teachers use the quiz before teaching a topic to determine how to focus their lesson or group students. Others have students take the quiz at the close of a lesson to assess their understanding of a topic. We offer the quiz in two formats:
- Review: proceeds to the next question only when a student chooses the correct answer
- Graded: accepts the first answer and reveals a score at the end of the quiz
With Quiz Mixer, you can customize your own BrainPOP-style quizzes! Write original questions or modify questions by BrainPOP or other teachers. Mix it up with different formats, including multiple choice, open response, and polls.
Challenge
Who says assessments can’t be fun? The BrainPOP Challenge is a game-like assessment you’ll find in over 200 BrainPOP topics. As students “play” the various Challenge activities, they meaningfully apply critical thinking skills without realizing it! The auto-graded activities emphasize eight key task types often used in standardized tests: concept map, diagram label, match, text highlight, multiple response, complete the sentence, sequence, and Venn diagram.
Get Set Up for Success with BrainPOP
Already have a BrainPOP subscription with school-wide access? Ready to go beyond the movie? From collaborating with co-teachers to customizing assignments, you have tools at your fingertips to meet these goals with ease.
- Set up your classes to create differentiated assignments and monitor progress. Then invite your students to join.
- Add co-teachers to your classes to collaborate and support your students.
- Visit your Teacher Dashboard to create customized assignments and track student progress.
- Share BrainPOP assignments to Google Classroom with ease!
Now that you know about the many resources BrainPOP offers, we invite you to dig deeper! Discover how BrainPOP can support accelerated learning in ways that are meaningful and engaging for all types of learners.
Interested in school-wide access, including pilot opportunities with BrainPOP? Contact a member of our Sales Team.
Jackie Glassman is director of educator content at BrainPOP. She began as a scriptwriter for BrainPOP ELL over a decade ago. Jackie is a published writer and editor of children’s books, websites, teaching resources, and all things educational.
