All series
Every show in the library, A–Z. 211 series and 17,039 episodes, each one vetted and tagged before it went in. Open a series to see its episodes, the standards it covers, and where to watch.
#MetKids
32 episodesThe Metropolitan Museum of Art turns its conservation lab into a kids' show. Each short Microscope episode asks a science-behind-the-art question and answers it with real Met objects: why old pennies and statues turn green, how egg makes Renaissance paint, what Pointillism does to your eyes, why armor held up, and how X-rays and electron microscopes reveal an artwork's secrets. Every explainer pairs with a make-along the class can do with household materials, from flipbooks to homemade tempera. Tagged for visual art, with science added where a clear standard fits. Best for grades 3 through 6.
All About the Holidays
54 episodesOne- and two-minute explainers on where a holiday came from and how people mark it. There is roughly a school year's worth, from Groundhog Day and April Fools' through Chinese New Year, Dia de los Muertos, Eid al-Fitr, Hanukkah, Christmas, and Easter, plus the heritage and awareness months. Several correct a common mix-up along the way: Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican independence, and Arbor Day looks forward rather than back. A few close by turning the question back on the class (how does your family mark this?). A quick, matter-of-fact way to open the calendar day.
Alma's Way
16 episodesAlma is a Puerto Rican kid in the Bronx, and each half hour hands her two small social problems to reason through. She learns to share the spotlight when friends say everything is always about her, to help a friend ice skate without embarrassing her, to meet Junior halfway on museum pace, and, after a visit from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to judge a dispute and umpire a kickball game fairly. Longer specials take the family to Puerto Rico and through a musical or two. Several titles are the American Sign Language cut. Strong for perspective-taking and neighborhood-scale community study.
Alphablocks
112 episodesFull episodes of the BAFTA-winning CBeebies phonics series, three to five minutes apiece. Letters are characters here: when they hold hands, their sounds blend and a word appears. The episodes track the progression a phonics sequence follows, starting with single letter sounds, then blending short words, then digraphs where two letters team up to make one new sound, then vowels stretching into the long sounds that say their own name, then longer and trickier strings. Because each one is short and aimed at a single step, you can pull exactly the episode that matches the sound your group is working on this week.
Amazing Animals
6 episodesSix one- to two-minute animal profiles from National Geographic Kids sit in the catalog: beetle, cobra, crocodile, gentoo penguin, polar bear, and wildebeest. Each clip does one job. It names the animal's habitat, then points at the body parts and behaviors that let it live there. Thick fur and huge paws on Arctic ice. Stiff flippers that let a penguin fly underwater. A hood a cobra spreads as a warning. Short enough to open a unit on adaptation or structure and function, or to hand a K-5 class a shared example before students go research an animal of their own.
America's Test Kitchen Kids
44 episodesAmerica's Test Kitchen Kids brings the test kitchen's playful food science to elementary cooks. Young chefs lead short, follow-along recipes and quick explainers, from grilled cheese and homemade tortillas to fizzy egg creams and edible spheres. Many episodes double as science you can taste: melting, freezing, browning, dissolving, and turning milk into cheese. A few zero in on real kitchen math like measuring liquids and leveling flour. Teachers reach for it for cross-curricular food-science segments, a rainy-day cooking activity, or a five-minute clip that makes a change of matter something a class can watch, pull, and eat.
Annedroids
38 episodesAnnedroids is a live-action and CGI series in which eleven-year-old inventor Anne runs real experiments in a junkyard laboratory with her friends Nick and Shania and the thinking, feeling androids she has built. Each episode wraps one science, engineering, or friendship problem inside a comedy adventure: helium flight, magnetism, dry ice, electricity from sun and wind, or a guard-bot built by studying how animals defend themselves. Seasons one through three stream free as full episodes on the official channel. Reach for it in grades one through five when you want a STEM concept delivered as a story, with a clear hook before an experiment or design activity.
Art Ninja
40 episodesArt Ninja is CBBC's make-along art show, where each short clip walks kids through one hands-on project: a drawing technique, a recycled craft, or a simple animation trick. Presenter Ricky Martin builds shiny foil pictures, cotton-bud pointillism, flip books, cardboard masks, and spinning zoetropes from everyday materials, then invites viewers to try it themselves. Teachers reach for it to fill a visual-art block with a clear, watch-and-do demonstration that needs almost no special supplies. The clips span drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and animation, and suit grades K through 6.
Art for Kids Hub
82 episodesRob draws alongside one of his own kids, and that is the whole format: an adult and a child working the same subject at the same pace. This collection leans hard into animals, among them pufferfish, blue tang, cuttlefish, cardinal, pelican, chicken, manatee, a diving peregrine falcon, and an entire coral reef. The cartoon versions run five or six minutes for the youngest artists; the detailed ones run ten to fifteen, with real layering and shading, and suit upper elementary. Because the subjects are so specific, they pair neatly with an ocean-animals or birds unit as the art half of the day.
Art with Mati & Dada
39 episodesMati and her sidekick Dada travel back in time to meet one artist per episode. There are 39 of them here, from Giotto around 1300 to Dorothea Lange in the 1930s, plus the occasional building, like Japan's Horyu-ji Temple. Each eight-minute stop looks at what made that artist's work different: Seurat's tiny dots, Arcimboldo's faces built from vegetables, Brancusi's polished shapes, Turner's stormy skies. The pair name the place and the century too, so the episodes stack into a rough timeline. Short enough to open a studio period, specific enough to leave students one technique to try.
Arthur
24 episodesFull episodes and specials from the long-running PBS KIDS series, free on the official channel, several with American Sign Language interpretation on screen. The catalog favors episodes teachers keep asking for by name: the school fire in "April 9th," the standardized-test worry of "S.W.E.A.T.," Brain getting hooked on a show and losing track of his friends, Mr. Ratburn's hearing loss, a weekend spent without spending a cent, and the holiday special where every family celebrates something different. Run times stretch from a 13-minute single story to hour-long specials. Strongest as a discussion starter about feelings and community.
Awesome 8
3 episodesThree countdown clips, about two and a half minutes apiece, from National Geographic Kids. The format is a countdown of eight: the strangest animals on the planet, standout snakes from record-breakers to expert hunters, and the wildlife of the Galapagos, where giant tortoises and marine iguanas live almost nowhere else. Fast pacing and a lot of species in a short window, which makes them better as a spark than as a source. Pause on one animal, ask why that body works where it lives, and send students to look the rest up. Only three episodes are in the catalog.
Bedtime History
74 episodesCalm, narrated true stories for the classroom — biographies of history-makers, world wonders, and how everyday things came to be. Each short episode turns one big moment into a clear, memorable story.
Best Job Ever
2 episodesOnly two clips are in the catalog, both National Geographic Kids shorts of about a minute and a half, and both answer the same question: what does someone's actual job look like? One follows a scientist working inside noisy chinstrap penguin colonies to learn how the birds live. The other rides out with nomadic herding families in Mongolia, where horses carry daily life across open grassland. Between them they cover a field researcher and a way of living most students have never seen. Small, but useful for a careers conversation or a look at how people fit the place they live.
Between the Lions
105 episodesShort segments lifted from the PBS literacy series, most running one to four minutes, and together they amount to a phonological-awareness workout more than a story hour. The recurring bits do the heavy lifting: Arty Smartypants peels the s off snail to leave nail, the Trampolini Brothers stage circus stunts to demonstrate brave, braver, bravest, and sung limericks put the rhythm of speech front and center. Mixed among them are complete read-alouds of picture books, including Are You a Snail? and An Egg Is Quiet. Good for K-2 word study in small, frequent doses.
Big Ideas by ClassDojo
27 episodesShort animated SEL videos built around Mojo, a monster who is usually the one struggling, and Katie, who talks him through it. They run in arcs: growth mindset (made with Stanford's PERTS lab), mindfulness (with Yale's Center for Emotional Intelligence), empathy (with Harvard's Making Caring Common), plus perseverance, moods, and big challenges. Each arc hands a class one shared word, whether that is the Dip, the Beast, the Maze, or the power of yet, that a teacher can point at later without re-explaining. Three of the 27 are follow-along breathing, movement, or yoga, short enough for a transition.
Bill Nye the Science Guy
99 episodesFull twenty-three-minute episodes of the 1990s series, one science topic each, in the format many teachers already know by heart: Bill demonstrates the thing instead of describing it. The subject list runs wide, covering amphibians, animal locomotion, birds, biodiversity, atoms, the atmosphere, balanced and unbalanced forces, archaeology, and architecture. Length is what to plan around, since an episode fills most of a period and works as the spine of a class rather than a warm-up. Grades three through six. Old enough now that a quick preview for dated references and outmoded framing is five minutes well spent.
Biz Kid$
7 episodesSeven episodes from the public-television money show for kids: five half-hours and two two-minute entrepreneur profiles. The long ones each take one financial idea and work it through with real kids and families. They cover what an allowance is for and the three things you can do with money, how saving plus compound interest turns small amounts into large ones, how to set a money goal and map a route to it, and starting a business from idea to business plan. The shorts profile Mo Bridges, sewing bow ties at nine, and Rachel Zietz, who built a lacrosse-gear company.
Bluejack Kids
9 episodesBluejack Kids is a set of short, brightly animated social-emotional learning shorts, most running three to five minutes, that each take on one skill kids can practice. A cartoon guide walks viewers through a single topic — naming emotions and noticing they come and go like ocean waves, calming down with coping moves, building self-confidence, how the brain's thinking and feeling parts work, speaking up assertively, resolving a conflict, taking another's perspective, and setting a goal. The tone is upbeat and concrete, with simple on-screen steps a class can try right away, pitched to the elementary grades. Because each short targets one skill, a teacher can pull the one a morning meeting or a hard moment calls for.
Bounce Patrol
34 episodesBounce Patrol is an Australian crew who make bright, live-action song-and-movement videos for the youngest classrooms. This selection gathers the songs a teacher actually reaches for: dance and action energizers that reset a restless room in two minutes, themed alphabet songs that walk from A to Z through the ocean, a farm, a building site or outer space, simple count-to-ten numbers songs, and healthy-habit songs for washing hands and brushing teeth. Most run two to four minutes with no setup. It fits pre-K through first grade, and works as a transition, a brain break, or a quick warm-up before letters or counting time.
BrainPOP
507 episodesTim and Moby animated shorts covering the upper-elementary and middle-grades curriculum across roughly five hundred topics. The range is unusually wide: absolute value and integers on a number line, active and passive voice, adjectives and adverbs, acceleration and the formulas behind it, air pollution and where it comes from, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, the American Revolution, Alvin Ailey, A Wrinkle in Time, 3D printing. Each movie runs a few minutes and takes one idea seriously rather than skimming several. Because the catalog also reaches into hard history, including the rise of Hitler, preview a topic before you decide where it fits your grade.
BrainPOP Jr.
331 episodesThe K-3 companion to BrainPOP, with Annie and Moby in place of Tim. Everything is scaled to what a young learner can hold at once: adding tens as a mental move, regrouping explained as trading rather than a rule to memorize, fact families where knowing one fact hands you three more, arrays as the quiet bridge into multiplication. The other half runs to biographies of Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Alexander Graham Bell, and author-illustrator Allen Say, plus ancient civilizations, Arctic habitats, and health and feelings topics like allergies and anger. Short, single-idea movies for the grades where one idea is plenty.
Brightly Storytime
424 episodesPicture-book read-alouds from Brightly, the family-reading channel run by Penguin Random House. Ms. Linda reads one book cover to cover per video, usually two to nine minutes, with the pages on screen. The shelf is wide: Abuela, A New Kind of Wild, a Corduroy Christmas story, dinosaur nonfiction, a book of colors, ABC Pride, and shortened classics like Alice in Wonderland and A Little Princess. There is no host segment and no quiz, just the book and a voice. Useful for circle time, a listening center, a substitute afternoon, or any stretch where the room needs a story and you need both hands free.
Carl the Collector
27 episodesCarl collects things, and the show says out loud that he is autistic rather than leaving it implied. Each 23-minute entry in Fuzzytown holds two stories. Collections drive some of them, including buttons salvaged from a broken mug, marbles, pine cones, a plushie pile that outgrows the room, and a good new word like "shindig." Others sit with something harder: a meltdown when excitement about an ice-cream festival tips over, Carl explaining himself to his friends after Nico takes a tumble, hearing music as colors and learning that not everyone does. Warm and slow, specific about feelings without getting clinical.
Carnegie Hall Kids
26 episodesCarnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute makes short, kid-facing music videos in two strands. In Sing with Carnegie Hall, host Emily Eagen and guest artists lead whole-family sing-alongs built around one idea at a time: rhythm, feelings, movement, nature, or family. In Music Around the World, a musician from a living tradition teaches children one real song from their culture and the story behind it, spanning Haiti, Kenya, Mali, India, Puerto Rico, Appalachia, a Southeast Native American song, China, Mexico, Brazil, and more. Reach for it to build singing and listening skills while connecting music to world cultures and history. Free, vetted, and welcoming for the youngest grades.
CashVille Kidz
24 episodesCashVille Kidz is a 24-episode animated series that teaches children how money works, one concept at a time. Produced by MoneyTree and free on its official YouTube channel, each seven-minute episode takes a single idea and explains it with kid-scale examples: why money beat barter, needs versus wants, opportunity cost, inflation, interest, debt, and how to build a budget. Woven through are money-mindset episodes on habits, goal-setting, and smart decisions. Pitched at grades three through six, it gives teachers a clear, friendly on-ramp to any economics or financial-literacy unit, introducing the vocabulary plainly before a class builds on it.
Cha-Ching Money Smart Kids
18 episodesThree-minute animated music videos performed by the Cha-Ching band, one song per money idea. The set opens with the four things a person can do with money (earn it, save it, spend it, donate it), then pulls each apart: what a budget is and why it gets written before the spending starts, how savings grow once a bank adds interest, why a card is still real money even when no coins change hands, what an entrepreneur actually does, what charity means. Short enough for a morning meeting and consistent enough to run weekly. Grades K-5.
Children's Fairytale Theater
16 episodesOriginal musical fairytales staged for young children by Children's Fairytale Theater -- a small upstate-New York company that films its live shows and posts them free. Each classic tale is built around a character value (respect, cooperation, trusting your instinct, anger management, bravery), and comes in several sizes: full-length stage productions, quick ~10-minute classroom versions with built-in questions, the original 2005 shorts, gentle "Storytime with Edie" tellings, and a few picture-book read-alouds. Press play for a theatre outing on the classroom screen.
City Island
56 episodesThree-minute animated shorts set in a busy little city, following Watt, Windy, and Frank as they run into the things a community is made of, such as how a mayor decides, what a flag stands for, why an ad wants your attention, and where clouds come from. A good stretch of the run is City Island Sings!, two-minute songs on voting, money, media, the messy jobs nobody thinks about, and the adults who keep a school running. Civics-heavy without being dry, and short enough to open a morning meeting or close one out.
Class Notes
28 episodesClass Notes is Minnesota Public Radio's free music series for elementary classrooms, and every short video unpacks one musical idea at a time. Young viewers meet the building blocks of music: tempo and rhythm, major and minor, tone color, rests, and how a conductor holds an orchestra together. Other episodes tour the instrument families, explore the singing voice and healthy vocal habits, and open the door to improvising, composing, and reading a score. Clear, friendly, and standards based, each short episode gives a K to 6 teacher a ready way to build real music literacy in a few focused minutes.
Clifford the Big Red Dog
40 episodesHalf-hour episodes, two stories each, set on Birdwell Island where Emily Elizabeth's enormous red dog and his friends work through the small social problems that fill a young child's week. Cleo cannot stand not being the leader. T-Bone takes a squeak toy that isn't his and cannot shake the guilt. Mac tears a sweater and runs away rather than own it. A new dog with three legs arrives and nobody knows how to act. Every pairing lands on something nameable: jealousy, stage fright, forgiving a friend, being blamed unfairly. That makes this a straight social-emotional pick for PreK through second.
Coach Corey Martin
78 episodesScreen-led movement brain breaks from Coach Corey Martin, a veteran PE teacher -- freeze dances, chase-and-hunt adventures, jump battles and holiday shuffles. The video runs the activity, so a teacher can just press play and get the whole class moving.
Code AI: CS Fundamentals
12 episodesConcept videos from Code.org free elementary computer science courses, one to six minutes each. The Real-Life Algorithms shorts unplug the idea completely, ordering the steps for planting a seed, folding a paper airplane, or running a dice game, and the debugging video reframes troubleshooting as something students already do in every subject. For older grades, the six-part How Computers Work series goes under the hood: what every computer shares, binary, circuits and logic gates, CPU and memory, hardware versus software. A plain explainer on what the internet actually is rounds it out and sets up any online-safety work.
Common Sense Education: Digital Citizenship
16 episodesOne short video per grade band from Common Sense Education, the nonprofit behind the digital-citizenship curriculum many districts already use. Each runs about one to three minutes and leaves students holding one concrete tool: a stop-slow-go internet traffic light in first grade, digital footprints as tracks in snow in second, the me-community-world rings of responsibility in third, the S-T-O-P strategy for hurtful language, and a way to check a headline, author, date, and source in fifth. Sorted by grade they form a spine for a media-balance, privacy, or cyberbullying unit, and the youngest ones are sing-alongs.
Cosmic Kids Yoga
321 episodesJaime leads kids through yoga by wrapping the poses inside a story, whether Alice in Wonderland or Alan the Camel, so a class is following a plot rather than holding a stretch. Sessions range from a five-minute pose challenge to a half-hour adventure, with a few Saturday-morning specials near an hour. A quieter second strand is guided meditation: affirmations, breathing exercises, and mindfulness prompts asking kids to slow down and notice what their body and feelings are doing. No mats and no experience required, which is what makes it workable in an ordinary classroom with the desks pushed back.
Coyote's Crazy Smart Science Show
27 episodesCoyote's Crazy Smart Science Show is an APTN children's series created by Métis and Cree filmmaker Loretta Todd that teaches science alongside Indigenous knowledge. Kid hosts called Science Questers explore light, sound, habitats, salmon, geology, and more, meeting real Indigenous scientists, architects, and Elders along the way. Companion "Hack This" segments turn each idea into a hands-on make-along, from a star projector and a milk-glue experiment to a self-supporting popsicle-stick bridge. Short, warm, and rooted in respect for the land, the segments stream free on the show's official YouTube channel. Reach for it in grades three to six to pair an NGSS concept with Indigenous perspectives and a quick build.
Crash Course Kids
102 episodesThe upper-elementary arm of Crash Course, produced by Complexly with PBS Digital Studios and hosted by Sabrina Cruz. Episodes run four to six minutes, move quickly, and sit at roughly a fifth-grade science scope: plate tectonics and how landscapes change over millions of years, urban heat islands and deforestation, freshwater scarcity and the engineering responses to it, controlling variables so an experiment can be trusted, brainstorming with what-if questions. A smaller set turns to reading, examining character traits in a novel. Dense enough that most classes will want to pause partway and talk, which is the best way to use it.
Create-A-Puppet Workshop
46 episodesShort make-along puppet workshops from the Center for Puppetry Arts (Atlanta) -- the largest US nonprofit devoted to the art of puppetry. In each ~3-minute video a teaching artist leads children step by step through building a paper puppet -- rod, hand, shadow, tabletop, string, or glowing ultraviolet -- many tied to a favorite storybook. Gather scissors, paper, and tape, press play, and build a puppet the class can bring to life.
Curious George
70 episodesFull-length episodes of the curious monkey, most around twenty minutes, each with a real question sitting under the mischief. George counts stars one at a time, builds a race car and revises the design, works out what gives his boat a push, watches birds closely enough to tell them apart, and dives to compare the animals living in the sea. A duckling decides he is its mother. Elsewhere he finds out what courage actually means, or plays detective with a handful of clues. The science, counting, and social-emotional ground gets covered without ever announcing itself, which makes it easy to hand to a preK through grade 2 room.
Cyberchase
170 episodesThe PBS Kids math adventure arrives here in two shapes. Half-hour episodes send the CyberSquad against Hacker across Cyberspace with a math idea buried in the plot. Fractions unlock a swirling portal, a balance scale reveals an unknown weight, penguins hold a fair vote and tally the results. Several push past math into fungi as nature's recyclers or what a crew does when the technology it depends on quits. Shorter standalone segments handle single skills: telling time, adding mixed numbers with unlike denominators. Mostly grades 3 through 6, though the segments and the gentler holiday episodes reach lower.
Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood
13 episodesThe animated successor to Mister Rogers, built around short sung strategies a child can carry off the screen: when you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a deep breath and count to four. The episodes stocked here are the ones teachers go looking for by situation. A substitute teacher arrives, a dentist visit is coming, a friend is in the hospital, Daniel meets Max, an autistic classmate who plays and communicates differently. Others cover jobs at the market, Thank You Day, and making the playground fair. Many carry an American Sign Language cut.
Danny Go!
102 episodesGet the whole class up and moving with Danny Go! -- freeze dances, floor-is-lava games, drum-alongs and follow-along adventures, plus a handful of learning songs. A screen-led movement break a teacher can just press play on.
Deep Look
193 episodesDeep Look is short-form natural history shot in extreme macro, close enough that a flea leg or a slug slime trail fills the whole frame. Episodes run four to six minutes and each takes one small creature and one surprising mechanism: the dragonfly larva jaw that folds out and shoots forward to seize prey, the springy pad that launches a flea a hundred times its own height, an archerfish aiming a jet of water up through the surface, a coral spawning once a year. Vivid enough for older elementary students, and precise enough to anchor a structure-and-function or life-cycle unit.
Design Squad Global
174 episodesShort build challenges from the PBS engineering series made by GBH Kids. Most run one to eight minutes and follow the same honest loop (plan it, build it, test it, make it better), with everyday junk standing in for a lab: a balloon-powered car, a CD hovercraft, bristle bots made from a toothbrush head, a rubber-band catapult, a redesigned lunchbox, a donation box built for a real neighborhood need. A few are pure explainers, like how a 3D printer stacks an ancient artifact layer by layer. Reach for these when an upper-elementary class needs a hands-on engineering task it can run tomorrow.
Destination World
4 episodesFour continent flyovers from National Geographic Kids, each under three minutes: Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. The clips work as aerial surveys rather than country studies. Africa's deserts, savannas, and rainforests come in sequence; Asia ranges from high mountains to dense cities; Australia does double duty as a country and a continent; South America brings the Andes, Amazon, and rainforest. Note that the set is partial, since North America, Europe, and Antarctica are not in the catalog. Best used as a geography warm-up before students map physical features or compare two continents, not as complete coverage of the seven.
Devine Entertainment Specials
15 episodesHour-long live-action dramas from Toronto-based Devine Entertainment, made in the 1990s in three sets: composers, painters, and inventors. Each film sets a real figure beside an invented child who works at their elbow, so the history arrives through a relationship rather than narration. The subjects include Bach, Handel, Liszt, Degas, Monet, Mary Cassatt, Rembrandt, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Marie Curie, and Einstein. The composer films are scored with that composer's own music. Several won or were nominated for Emmys. At 48 to 60 minutes one film fills a class period; upper-elementary teachers should preview for period hardship, wartime injury, and era racism.
Dinosaur Train
29 episodesBuddy is a T. Rex raised by a Pteranodon family, and the train takes them anywhere in the age of dinosaurs. Two-minute clips make up most of the 29 entries: how horns and frills protected Triceratops, what a Castorocauda's beaver tail was for, predator and prey, fossils hiding in rock layers, Pangaea splitting into continents, an alphabet of dinosaurs from Apatosaurus to Zephyrosaurus. Full episodes run 24 to 27 minutes and often turn on family, whether that is how different dinosaur dads care for their young or Buddy realizing his mom was a kid once. Two movies run 53 and 85 minutes.
Disney Educational Videos
12 episodesFeature-length Disney films that earn their place in a classroom — built around classical music, the natural world, and the art of animation itself. Long-form: plan for a full period or split them across a few days.
Donkey Hodie
23 episodesA puppet series set in Someplace Else, close enough to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe that Daniel Tiger and his dad come to visit in one episode. The catalog mixes 23-minute stories with two-minute songs. The long ones include a Halloween that takes some courage, a New Year's look back, a road trip, and a quiet game that turns into a test of self-control; among the songs are covers of "It's You I Like" and "It's Such a Good Feeling." Filed under social-emotional learning, brain breaks and for-fun, which is an honest description: a sing-along, a wiggle break, or a gentle story for pre-K through first grade.
DragonflyTV
92 episodesTelevision's most acclaimed real-kids science series (Twin Cities PBS). In every segment, kids ask a question about the world, design a fair test, gather data, and share what they found — modeling authentic, hands-on scientific inquiry.
Draw So Cute
77 episodesWennie draws one cheerful cartoon subject per video, step by step, in the rounded style the channel is named for. The catalog is mostly food and animals, among them apple, avocado, banana, boba tea, a baby duck, an owl, a pig, a whale, a bat, and a bow, each built up from a few simple shapes before any detail arrives. Videos run five to eight minutes and the pacing is slow enough that a kindergartner keeps up if you pause between steps. Good for art time, for an early finisher with paper and a pencil, or for a quiet last ten minutes.
Draw with Rob
34 episodesDraw with Rob is illustrator Rob Biddulph's step-by-step draw-along series, made free for children and used by schools around the world. In each video he draws one subject in real time and invites kids to follow, breaking a whole animal, food, or character into simple shapes anyone can manage. This collection gathers universal favorites: a sausage dog, a peacock, a sloth, a realistic fox, a self portrait, a stack of pancakes, and a monster of your own invention. Reach for it to build drawing confidence and core art skills like shape, pattern, proportion, texture, and expression. Every episode streams free on the official channel.
Edufrienz
3 episodesElinor Wonders Why
38 episodesElinor asks a lot of questions, and each 23-25 minute entry carries two eleven-minute stories built on one of them: why the pond froze on top but not underneath, where a roly poly is headed, what tears actually do, how bats find their way in the dark. Several are ASL editions with an on-screen interpreter. The set also holds a 56-minute movie about a nature-preserve trip where Elinor's constant wondering turns out to be the thing that saves the day. Strong for early science talk, and for the kids who ask before they know how to look.
Everyday Writing with Coach Write
11 episodesCoach Write is a whistle-wearing writing coach who runs each short lesson like a basketball practice: warm up, learn one move, then run it yourself. Filmed in a gym for PBS Western Reserve, the series breaks everyday writing into single, doable skills: choosing precise words, varying sentence length, linking ideas with transitions, building a paragraph, and avoiding plagiarism. It also covers the writing kinds a young author needs, from opinions and lists to informing and telling a story. On-screen examples get rewritten in real time so students see a plain sentence become a stronger one. Practical, upbeat, and built for grades K–6.
Faerie Tale Theatre
21 episodesShelley Duvall's Emmy-nominated 1980s anthology, performed live-action with a marquee cast and staged more like filmed theatre than television. Twenty-one tales are in the catalog, most running 40 to 56 minutes: Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Rip Van Winkle. Because actors and sets carry the story rather than animation, each one earns its place twice, once inside a folk-and-fairy-tale unit and once for comparing the version students already know against a staged retelling of the same tale.
Fizzy's Lunch Lab
108 episodesThe Emmy-nominated PBS Kids series where Professor Fizzy and the gang make healthy eating, nutrition and active living fun. Short episodes, songs, recipes and field trips for K-4.
Flocabulary
203 episodesFlocabulary builds each topic around an original hip-hop song and animated music video, then hangs vocabulary cards and activities off it on the topic page. The elementary catalog here leans toward drilled fundamentals, including an addition and subtraction series that walks number by number from 2 and 3 all the way up through 17, alongside social studies staples like the fifty states and capitals, a run-through of the presidents, and poems on the language-arts side. The song does the teaching, and the words stick because they rhyme. Most of the library sits behind a Flocabulary subscription, so check your school access first.
Franklin
61 episodesHalf-hour episodes of the young turtle from the picture books, each holding two separate stories. The material is almost entirely social-emotional, and it is handled without a moral tacked on the end. Franklin finds a marble and has to decide whether finders really is keepers. He breaks the classroom globe and has to work himself up to admitting it. He judges a grumpy neighbor, and a new kid named Wolvie, before knowing either of them. He feels crowded out by a new baby, and he faces the dark cellar. Made for preK through grade 2, and the conversation afterward is where the value sits.
Franklin and Friends
54 episodesHalf-hour episodes, most pairing two short stories, following Franklin the turtle and his Woodland friends through the ordinary business of being small: sharing a buggy, changing an unfair game rule, coaching a team without playing favorites, losing a tooth, sitting out a thunderstorm. Two 45-minute adventure specials take the group to the deep sea and the polar regions to meet the animals that live there, and one episode walks through the four seasons. The pull here is social-emotional (cooperation, patience, naming a fear), wrapped in stories PreK through second grade will sit still for.
FreeSchool
328 episodesFreeSchool is a narrated-and-illustrated channel with an unusually broad shelf. Much of it is nonfiction survey: ten facts about penguins or polar bears, Creature Countdown rundowns of extinct animals and rare wild cats, and a two-minute tour of each of the fifty states covering where it sits on the map and what it is known for. Some is straight instruction instead, like two-digit addition with regrouping and the place value that makes carrying work. Calm narration over stills and simple animation, with no host on camera. That makes it easy to pause partway through and talk about, which is usually the point.
Generation Genius
187 episodesStandards-aligned science and math videos with a smaller reading strand alongside. Titles name the skill plainly, from adaptations and how they help living things survive to animal group behavior, adding and subtracting within 20 and then within 100, fractions with like and unlike denominators, and the standard algorithm and why it is faster on bigger numbers. The reading titles work the same way, taking on concrete language and sensory details, or using question words to monitor your own understanding as you read. Each entry names the grades it is written for and comes with reading material. A fit when you want the video to match the standard already on the board.
GoNoodle
456 episodesGoNoodle exists for the minutes between lessons. Three kinds of video sit side by side here: movement tracks that get everyone standing and shaking it out, guided calming exercises such as balanced breathing and animal breath for settling a room after recess or before a test, and songs that teach the alphabet, the vowels, or an address line-up while the class moves. A social-emotional strand covers naming feelings and standing up to bullies. Most run one to four minutes, a number have Spanish versions, and some are signed in ASL. Cue one when the room has run out of attention.
Gracie's Corner
143 episodesAnimated sing-alongs from the Hollingsworth family in Houston, who built the channel during the pandemic after noticing how few preschool videos featured Black children. The songs cover a wide spread: the alphabet and vowel-sound play, counting, continents and early map words, hygiene and healthy habits, and a large social-emotional run on honesty, respect, and believing in yourself. Many are familiar nursery rhymes rebuilt over the group's own beat, including Baa Baa Black Sheep and a second-line remix of Bingo. Aimed at pre-K through second grade, and well suited to a morning start or a soft landing after recess.
GrammarSongs by Melissa
44 episodesMelissa Boyd sets one grammar or reading term to music per video, four to eleven minutes each, and the catalog covers most of what a K-6 language block asks for: nouns of every kind, action and helping verbs, adjectives, adverbs, the FANBOYS conjunctions, correlative pairs, direct objects, complex sentences, comma rules, contractions, compound words, alliteration, antonyms. Comprehension terms such as context clues, cause and effect, compare and contrast, and fact versus opinion get the same treatment, as do the confusables like good versus well. One term, one song, no wandering. Built to drop into a language warm-up, a small-group rotation, or a center.
Grammaropolis
21 episodesAnimated music videos that hand every part of speech and every punctuation mark its own character and its own song. The catalog runs the full eight parts of speech alongside the marks that trip kids up: apostrophes for contractions and possession, commas, the colon as organizer, hyphen against dash, parentheses and brackets, the exclamation mark. A synonyms-and-antonyms number is in there too. Each video lasts two to four minutes, which is about right for an ELA warm-up, a hook at the top of a mini-lesson, or a review station a student can replay alone.
Growing Primary
118 episodesGrowing Primary is a K–2 literacy channel built around the skills early readers work on every day. Short, kid-facing lessons walk children through phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, syllable types, grammar and sentence writing, reading comprehension, vocabulary, handwriting, and a set of quick math fact-fluency drills. Each video teaches one clear skill with plenty of guided practice, so a teacher can drop it into a small-group rotation, a warm-up, or a whole-class review. Reach for this collection when you want a friendly, focused explainer of a single reading or writing skill for kindergarten through second grade. Every title is vetted and appropriate for the classroom.
Hap Palmer
118 episodesThe catalog of a children's-music songwriter whose recordings have lived in early-childhood classrooms for decades, gathered here as tracks of two to four minutes. Three strands: early arithmetic from his Count, Add, Subtract collection, where children add and take away within ten in time with the music; alphabet and letter-sound songs, often with movement or a bean bag folded in; and plain silly sing-alongs such as Backwards Land and Amanda Schlupp. Because movement is baked into most of it, a track doubles as a transition. Strongest in pre-K through second grade, where the counting and letter songs do real work.
Happy Learning
138 episodesAnimated explainers, four to eleven minutes apiece, that take one topic at a time and stay plain about it. Three broad areas fill the catalog: elementary math such as addition and naming angles by size; life science sorted by animal group, with separate videos on amphibians, arachnids, and birds; and social studies moving between the continents and the ancient world, from Egypt's pharaohs and pyramids to Greece and Rome. Narration is calm and the visuals stay uncluttered. That makes these a comfortable fit at a center or as a short review closing a unit, rather than the main event.
Have Fun Teaching
120 episodesHave Fun Teaching makes short, singable songs that put one classroom skill to a beat. This collection gathers the catalog's core skill songs for the youngest grades: skip counting by one through twelve, counting up and down, comparing numbers, prime numbers, naming and classifying shapes, the parts of speech, sentence types, cause and effect, and graded sight-word drills from preschool through third grade. A social-emotional and healthy-habits set rounds it out, covering feelings, manners, mistakes, brushing teeth, and washing hands. Reach for one as a two-to-five-minute warm-up, transition, or review that a whole room can sing along with.
Hero Elementary
17 episodesA PBS science show about young superheroes-in-training who solve neighborhood problems using what Mr. Sparks calls the superpowers of science: observing, asking questions, investigating, and communicating. Two formats are stocked here. Full 25-minute episodes pair segments, so one might chase down a runaway giant ball with pushes and pulls, sort frogs from toads, or figure out why a plant is struggling. Shorter PBS LearningMedia collections gather a few clips around one investigation on shadows, light, materials, motion, or what animals need. Those collections are the easy drop-in for a K-2 science block; the full episodes carry an inclusion thread alongside the content.
Hip Hop Public Health
53 episodesH.Y.P.E. (Hip Hop Public Health) is a nonprofit founded at Columbia University by neurologist Dr. Olajide Williams and hip-hop artist Doug E. Fresh. Its H.Y.P.E. movement series turns short hip-hop routines into classroom physical-activity breaks: dance moves broken down step by step, with seated modifications and varying levels of intensity so every kid can join in.
Hoffman Academy
229 episodesJoseph Hoffman teaches his free elementary piano curriculum straight to camera in videos of roughly seven to twenty-five minutes. This is a real course rather than a pile of clips: posture and hand shape first, then finger skips one pair at a time, the A major and A minor pentascales, staccato, time signatures including 3/8 and 6/8, and phrasing and dynamics. Pieces get taught in parts across several videos, first melody, then accompaniment, then the same tune again with pedal. Built for a keyboard station, a music center, or a whole-class block where every child has something to play along on.
Homeschool Pop
66 episodesDaniel narrates thorough single-topic overviews, generally longer than the usual explainer at seven to eighteen minutes, with clear visuals carrying most of the load. Math runs from addition and counting-on through 2D and 3D shapes, covering faces, edges, vertices, and how the flat ones become the faces of the solid ones. Area and reading an analog clock down to quarter past and quarter to are here too. Social studies covers ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and a Lincoln biography that reaches the 13th Amendment. Language arts picks up antonyms and vocabulary. Enough depth to introduce a topic properly, not just review one.
Horrible Histories
33 episodesHorrible Histories turns the past into comedy songs, and this collection gathers the show's musical numbers into a fast, funny history playlist for grades 3 to 6. Pulled from the official BBC Studios channel, each song packs one topic into two or three minutes: the Stone Age and ancient Egypt, Greeks and Romans, Tudors and Victorians, on to the suffragettes, Rosa Parks, and the Second World War. Teachers reach for these as a memorable hook or a quick review, and every title carries its own discussion questions and a short activity. The set is curated and vetted for upper-elementary classrooms.
How Things Work
8 episodesFive short explainers from National Geographic Kids, two to three minutes each, that open up a familiar object and show the mechanism inside. A 3-D printer melts plastic and stacks thin layers until a solid shape exists. A digital camera swaps film for a sensor that turns a scene into a grid of pixels. A lava lamp's blobs rise and fall as heat changes the wax's density. A trebuchet flings a load by dropping a counterweight. The odd one out is gecko feet, where millions of microscopic hairs grip glass. That makes a natural partner to the engineered examples for a design or biomimicry conversation.
How the Body Works
18 episodesAnimated shorts from Nemours KidsHealth, made with the studio FlickerLab, in which a girl named Chloe and her sidekick Nurb tour one piece of the body per video. Four to seven minutes each, and the coverage is methodical: bones and skeleton, brain and nervous system, heart, lungs, digestion, the urinary system, the endocrine system, the immune system, plus eyes, ears and hair. One episode handles healthy weight by saying plainly that bodies come in every shape and size. Pitched at grades 2-6 and detailed enough to carry a body-systems unit on its own.
Indigenous Art Adventures
46 episodesIndigenous Art Adventures with Lance Cardinal is a free craft show for elementary classrooms, hosted by a two-spirit visual artist of the Bigstone Cree Nation. In warm, Mr. Dressup-style tutorials, Lance leads kids step by step through make-alongs built from everyday materials: dream catchers, moccasin keepsakes, star-blanket sun catchers, moose and tipi projects, and seasonal decorations. Every episode teaches a Cree word and shares the teachings behind the art, so the making arrives with genuine cultural context. The catalog spans his original Family Art Adventures broadcasts, the numbered web series, and a grade-tied School Series with projects sorted by band. Award-winning, gentle, and ready to press play on.
Jack Hartmann Kids
1827 episodesJack Hartmann has built a working library of learning songs, and well over a thousand of them are here, most two to four minutes long. The pattern rarely changes: a catchy tune, a beat kids can move to, and one skill drilled until it sticks. The skill might be counting and skip-counting, ten more and ten less, 2D and 3D shapes, states of matter, the five senses, rhyming and word families, or the months of the year. Others are pure sing-along, from nursery rhymes to five little monkeys to a line dance, with no skill attached. Teachers reach for these as warm-ups, transitions, and the stand-up-and-reset moment between blocks.
Kennedy Center: Teaching Artists Present
61 episodesWorking artists each teach one activity, filmed for the Kennedy Center and pitched at a class rather than an audience. The range is unusually wide: Deepa Mani introducing the positions and hand gestures of Bharatanatyam, Sarah Alden and Samuel Torres on Puerto Rican Bomba and its call and answer between dancer and drummer, Afro-Peruvian rhythm and movement, alphabet improv, pantomime, a five-senses journey to outer space, shadow puppets filmed like a movie, composing music out of everyday sounds and happy accidents. Six to sixteen minutes apiece. Clear a space, press play, and the artist runs the session.
Khan Academy
22 episodesKhan Academy is the free nonprofit learning resource teachers already trust, and these are its short elementary-math lessons. Sal Khan works one skill at a time on a digital whiteboard: naming and sorting shapes, splitting wholes into equal parts, building and comparing fractions on a number line, reading scaled bar graphs and line plots, classifying triangles and angles, drawing with a protractor, and converting customary units. Each clip runs a few minutes and lands on a single grade 2 through 4 standard, so you can drop one in to introduce a concept, reteach a small group, or send it home. Every video is vetted for classroom use.
Khan Academy Kids
183 episodesTwo quite different things share this shelf. One is a set of read-alouds. These are original picture books such as A Helping Hand and Abuela Chela Quits, around four minutes each, meant to be heard together and then talked about. The other is a long run of very short math clips, most well under a minute: adding with objects, adding with ten frames, adding three numbers, two-digit addition with base ten blocks, adding and subtracting by ten. Those clips are almost too brief to be a whole activity, which is what makes them handy as a quick model right before the manipulatives come out.
Kid President
52 episodesRobby Novak, in a suit and tie, talking straight to camera about being a person worth being. The pep talks run three to five minutes and say things like keep going, you matter, awesome looks like you. The longer Kid Correspondent pieces, ten to fifteen minutes, take on how a group makes a fair decision, whether kids' voices count, and how to disagree with someone and stay friends. Socktober turns the whole thing into an actual collection drive for socks. Reach for a pep talk on a rough Monday; reach for a Correspondent episode when the class needs to argue well.
KidLit TV Read Out Loud
38 episodesKidLit TV Read Out Loud brings full picture books to life on screen, with authors, illustrators, and guest readers reading each story aloud from cover to cover. This collection gathers 38 titles a K to 4 teacher can use for read-aloud time, comprehension practice, or a quiet close to the day. Stories build skills in character, theme, point of view, rhyme, and reading pictures, and many reach into other subjects: biographies of Harriet Tubman and the Williams sisters, a counting book, weather and moon-phase science, and gentle stories about feelings, grief, and kindness. Every book streams free on the official KidLit TV channel with a direct link to each one.
KidVision Pre-K
2 episodesKidVision Pre-K is a public television series from South Florida PBS in which host Miss Penny and a small group of preschoolers take on-location field trips to places young children are curious about. Each episode explores a working site up close, meets the people there, and tries things hands-on. The art museum visits gathered here introduce the youngest viewers to what a museum is, the people who care for the art, and the different ways art can be shown, from paintings on a wall to a hands-on children's museum. Teachers of pre-K through first grade can reach for these as a friendly first look before or after a real trip.
Kids Explain Art to Experts
3 episodesKids Explain Art to Experts is a short, playful gallery game from Google Arts & Culture. In each episode a young child stands before a famous painting and describes it out loud: the colors, the people, what seems to be happening. Two art experts then try to guess the work from those words alone. There is no lecture and no jargon: the fun is a five- or nine-year-old noticing exactly what a masterpiece shows. For a K–5 art class it is a lively model of looking closely and putting a picture into words, turning American Gothic, Vermeer, and Frida Kahlo into a guessing game anyone can play.
Kids Learning Tube
46 episodesAnimated sing-alongs, most two to five minutes, that set a factual list to a tune so it sticks. The geography run walks continent by continent and adds the five oceans, the fifty states and their capitals. The space run does the eight planets in order and explains why Pluto got reclassified, a handy example of scientists changing their minds when the evidence changes. Elsewhere: photosynthesis, arthropods, how tornadoes and hurricanes form, the heart and circulatory system, the brain and nervous system, and a toothbrushing reminder for the youngest. Reference material more than story, so reach for it as a unit anchor or a morning warm-up.
Kids vs. Plastic
2 episodesTwo make-along shorts from National Geographic Kids, both under three minutes, both about giving a used item a second life instead of buying a new one. In the first, an old pair of jeans becomes a pencil case. In the second, a T-shirt turns into a reusable tote with no sewing required. That is one fewer single-use plastic bag. The set is small but hands-on: it puts a waste-and-materials conversation next to something students actually build, which is why these carry both a science and an art tag. Gather scissors and old clothes before you press play.
Kids' Poems and Stories with Michael Rosen
50 episodesMichael Rosen performing his own poems straight to camera, most of them one to three minutes. The everyday ones catch a small moment and blow it up, whether that is raiding the fridge, biting food that is far too hot, or the pile-up of things grown-ups tell you not to do. Chocolate Cake, at eight minutes, is a masterclass in comic timing and using your voice to build suspense. There are Rhyme Time sessions with actions for the youngest, and Hairy Tales, which scramble nursery rhymes and fairy tales for a laugh. Good for performance poetry, listening comprehension, or a two-minute reset.
Kindness 101 with Steve Hartman
21 episodesKindness 101 with Steve Hartman turns the CBS reporter's real-life feel-good stories into short character lessons made for children. In each five-minute segment, Hartman and his own kids introduce one virtue, from compassion and honesty to perseverance, inclusion, and gratitude, then tell one true story of an everyday person who lived it out: a Girl Scout who wouldn't oversell her cookies, a boy who fed the hungry in a cape, a class that built a playground everyone could use. Warm and quick, each carries discussion questions and a simple work-a-long, making it an easy way to open a morning meeting or a social-emotional block. Vetted for grades K to 6.
Kodable
7 episodesKoo Koo Kanga Roo
69 episodesA two-man band whose entire act is getting a room to copy their moves. Every song is two to four minutes of follow-along dancing built on one silly premise: air guitar, shivering in the cold, only ever eating pizza, popping bubble wrap, stacking bread and cheese and bread. A few carry a message worth keeping. B-E-L-I-E-V-E spells out believing you can do hard things, and 'Bestest Friend' makes a decent morning-meeting opener. The rest exist to burn off energy. Reach for one at a transition, on an indoor-recess day, or whenever the wiggles have clearly won.
Learn Bright
26 episodesShort animated explainers, most between four and eleven minutes, each taking one curriculum topic straight on. Science carries the bulk of it: habitats and biomes, food chains, animal adaptations, photosynthesis, plant parts, states of matter, light, magnetism, moon phases, plus a "Dinos A to Z" run of quick fact-files on individual prehistoric animals. Beside those sit grammar basics, map-reading skills, the seven continents, and needs versus wants. Plain narration, clear graphics, no story frame and no host. Reach for one when you want a tight introduction or a review pass before an assessment.
Learning Mole
119 episodesLearning Mole answers the questions kids actually ask, one short clip at a time. A friendly narrator takes on a single wonder, such as how sound is made, why reptiles have scales, what the Colosseum was, or how to find an average, and explains it in a minute or two with clear pictures and everyday examples. The videos here are vetted picks across science, geometry and number, grammar, and ancient history and biography. Each is quick enough to drop into a warm-up or a spare five minutes, yet rich enough to open a class discussion. A handy way to spark curiosity across the elementary grades.
Let's Go Luna!
43 episodesA traveling circus takes Leo, Carmen, and Andy to a new country in every story, with Luna the moon stepping down to show them around. The catalog holds both formats: full 24-to-25-minute episodes set in London, Paris, and New Orleans, and one-to-three-minute clips pulled from them, in which the kids read a hieroglyph riddle, tell time on a giant sundial in India, watch a kathputli puppet show, try tai chi, and find out how a didgeridoo is made. A 46-minute special travels for the winter holidays. Easy geography and world-cultures material for PreK through third, free from PBS KIDS.
Let's Learn
54 episodesStandalone teaching segments spanning most of a primary day: phonics (blending sounds, the digraph ck, the complex vowel aw), math (comparing quantities, fact families, halves and fourths broken from graham crackers), hands-on science (cars on ramps, layered liquids, states of matter), read-alouds, virtual field trips to places like Cuba, and short movement or calming breaks such as belly breathing, dancing your feelings, and a bedtime stretch. Each one teaches a single skill and stops, so you can pull just the one you need. Best for PreK through third grade.
Liberty's Kids
40 episodesTwenty-three-minute animated episodes that cover the American Revolution through three young reporters working out of Benjamin Franklin's print shop. The battles are here, from Bunker Hill to the Delaware crossing to Saratoga's payoff in the French alliance, but so is the argument: Common Sense changing minds, Patrick Henry's speech, Paine's words read aloud to freezing troops. The series keeps returning to who the promise left out, with episodes on Mum Bett suing for her freedom and James Armistead spying for Lafayette and returning to slavery anyway. Substantial upper-elementary history that doesn't flatten the hard parts.
Little Sports
42 episodesFollow-along workouts for kids, 15 to 21 minutes each, led by an on-screen trainer who demonstrates every move. The 36 here sort by what they build: steady cardio, low-impact routines with no jumping for a room above someone else's class, standing-only sets for a small space, bodyweight strength, agility drills, balance work, and stretching. Timed intervals and rest breaks are built into the video, so nobody has to count or call time. No equipment, no setup, no gym. Push the desks back, press play, and move with it. An honest substitute when PE gets rained out.
Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems
16 episodesWhen the Kennedy Center closed in March 2020, its first Education Artist-in-Residence opened his studio instead and posted a doodle session every weekday. Each roughly twenty-minute episode is a draw-along: the Pigeon, Gerald the Elephant, Piggie assembled from a letter J and a number 3, Knuffle Bunny, Leonardo the terrible monster. Others pivot to making, with paper finger puppets, a flipbook, and an invented game called Super Bounce that runs across the whole series. Willems keeps insisting your version should not look like his. Fifteen episodes plus a graduation and a one-year reunion; good for an illustrating block or indoor recess.
Lyla in the Loop
20 episodesA PBS KIDS series about Lyla Loops, her family, and Stu, the big blue creature only she can see. Each half hour holds two stories, and every story is a problem taken apart in steps: designing a morning routine so the family stops running late, debugging why Stu has started beeping, testing and retesting a homemade cleanup contraption, sequencing a sandwich or a batch of cookies, working out the timing inside a double-dutch rope. It is computational thinking dressed as an ordinary week, where you plan, try, look at what broke, and revise. Pre-K through grade 2.
Mark Rober
79 episodesA former NASA engineer builds absurdly ambitious things and shows the reasoning underneath them. This collection spans the squirrel obstacle courses (three of them, each a bigger engineering build and an accidental animal-behavior study) alongside a dartboard that moves itself to catch the dart, 25 million water beads dumped in a pool to test buoyancy, and 200 wallets dropped across cities to turn honesty into data. Several aim squarely at classroom projects: egg drops, mousetrap cars, ten science-fair ideas done properly. Most run ten to twenty-plus minutes, so plan on one as the anchor of a period rather than a filler.
Martha Speaks
18 episodesShort PBS KIDS clips from the animated series about a dog who ate a bowl of alphabet soup and started talking instead of digesting it. Most run one to three minutes: Martha explains how she got her voice, Helen reads a favorite bedtime story aloud, a bath turns a soggy Martha into what everyone mistakes for a wild dog, and a cat claims her chair. Several of the stories turn on a misunderstanding that clears up once somebody looks closer, which is handy for first-impressions talk. At this length they slot in as a vocabulary warm-up, a read-aloud model, or an opener before writing.
Mashup Math
18 episodesMashup Math is a free YouTube channel of short, colorful lessons that walk grades 3 through 6 students through one math skill at a time. Narrator Anthony Persico builds each idea from a picture before the rule: fraction bars, area-model boxes, unit cubes, and number lines make the reasoning visible. This vetted collection gathers the upper-elementary slice, including equivalent fractions, fraction arithmetic, decimals, multi-digit multiplication, the distributive property, order of operations, area and volume, using a protractor, line symmetry, bar graphs, line plots, and ratios. Each clip runs from two to twelve minutes, so a teacher can drop one into a math block, pause to work an example, and match it to a specific standard.
Math & Learning Videos 4 Kids
178 episodesAlso known as Mage Math, this channel teaches through bright 3-D animation with a worked example on screen for nearly every step. Coverage is grade-labeled and spans elementary maths end to end: counting within 120 on a hundred chart in grade 1, the commutative and associative properties, multi-digit addition staged in outer space, fractions with unlike denominators and mixed numbers in grades 4 and 5, decimals, and absolute value by grade 6. A handful of alphabet and read-along videos sit off to one side. Most run three to eleven minutes and are built to pause so kids can try the next step themselves.
Math Antics
77 episodesAnimated math instruction that stays on one topic and works it all the way through with examples on screen. The library covers most of the elementary arc: area and basic division for grades 3 and 4, naming angles and measuring them with a protractor, classifying triangles by sides and angles, common denominators both the easy way and the least way, adding and subtracting fractions, mixed numbers, then grade 6 material like absolute value, inequalities, and basic probability. Runtimes sit between four and thirteen minutes. Nothing is rushed and everything pauses cleanly, so it is easy to stop mid-problem and let the class try it.
Math with Mr. J
1084 episodesA one-teacher math channel: Mr. J at a whiteboard, working problems out loud in three to ten minutes. The catalog runs heavily to procedure. Expect 2-digit by 2-digit multiplication with the standard algorithm, 3-digit by 1-digit, partial products and area models, and turning a decimal like 2.6 into a fraction by reading its place value, plus a full set of timed fact drills for every multiplication and division table from 2 through 12. Longer entries work practice problems on screen. No characters, no story. This is the review video you cue when a class needs the steps shown once more before independent work.
Media Minute
6 episodesA six-part set of short animated videos from MediaSmarts, Canada's media-literacy non-profit, made to hand kids the five key concepts of media literacy. Each ~1.5-minute episode takes one big idea -- media are built from parts, every medium has its own form, media are made for money, media shape what we think, and audiences make their own meaning -- illustrates it with a simple analogy, and ends with a "be media smart" challenge for the viewer to try. A tidy, kid-facing on-ramp to any media-literacy or digital-citizenship unit.
Media Stamped
4 episodesA kids' media-literacy series from Sinking Ship Entertainment and Global Citizen, hosted by children's educator Nicole Stamp. Across four short episodes, Media Stamped teaches kids to read media with a critical eye -- how screens are designed to hold attention, how images and sound are edited to shape feelings, and how the words around a story can bend your opinion. Each episode is a quick, kid-facing guide to becoming a smarter, calmer maker and viewer of media.
Meet the Helpers
74 episodesOne- to three-minute portraits of the people a child might meet in an emergency, made by WUCF with early-childhood and crisis-communication specialists and built for ages 3 to 8. Real people in real workplaces, no cartoons: the 9-1-1 operator who stays calm and asks questions before sending help, the doctor, the counselor who listens to big feelings, the American Sign Language interpreter carrying spoken words to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Several jobs come in both a one-minute look and a longer visit. These fit a morning meeting, a transition, or a calm conversation about who helps.
Miacademy Learning Channel
39 episodesMiacademy's second-grade social studies course, broken into 38 short videos. Most are "Let's Take a Journey" stops in Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, Greece, and Indonesia, each finding the country on a map and comparing its land, weather, and daily life with the viewer's own. Others visit American communities to show the difference between a city, a suburb like Beaverton, Oregon, and rural Boone, Iowa. A few cover early economics: goods versus services, and the producers who supply them. An opener previews the year and a review closes it, so the set works in order or one country at a time.
MightyOwl
25 episodesStandards-aligned animated lessons from the MightyOwl curriculum studio, each running five to nine minutes and built for a single K-5 skill. A cheerful narrator walks kids through one grammar rule, reading skill, science idea, or math concept at a time, with clear examples and a try-it prompt. The catalog spans early language arts (nouns and verbs, syllables, rhyming, shades of meaning, sentence types, commas), foundational science (sound, states of matter, habitats, weathering, inherited traits), and math (counting by tens, word problems, equivalent fractions, measuring angles). Because every video targets one grade-labeled objective, a teacher can pull exactly the clip that matches the day.
Mind Blooming
15 episodesMind Blooming is a set of short animated ELA lessons where one host stands at a whiteboard and unpacks a single reading or vocabulary idea with worked examples on screen. This flagship gathers the reading-comprehension and word-study spine: finding the main idea and theme, tracing cause and effect, sequence, and story elements, sorting an author’s purpose, and building word power through synonyms, antonyms, prefixes, suffixes, compound words, similes, metaphors, and context clues for figuring out an unfamiliar word. Each runs one to four minutes and gives a class shared vocabulary before they read, so a teacher can drop one in to introduce or review a skill.
Mind Yeti
18 episodesShort, guided mindfulness sessions for kids from Committee for Children, the non-profit behind Second Step. Each one is a one-to-six-minute practice a teacher can press play on for the whole class -- a slow breath to settle down, a body scan to sharpen focus, a listen-for-one-sound exercise, or a gratitude or kindness reflection -- narrated in a calm, friendly voice made for children ages 5-12. Three short explainers introduce what mindfulness is, how practice changes the brain, and how to get your body ready. A ready-made toolkit for calm-down moments, transitions, and social-emotional learning.
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
25 episodesFull episodes and short clips from Fred Rogers' PBS series, pulled from the official archive. The catalog leans on what the show did best: the how-people-make-it factory films (crayons, ice cream, postage stamps), visits with real people such as Eric Carle painting the tissue paper he cuts his pictures from, Sylvia Earle snorkeling, Ella Jenkins teaching a clapping rhyme, and Koko the gorilla. Then there are the Neighborhood of Make-Believe scenes where a feeling gets named instead of argued away. Lengths run from a two-minute song to a 47-minute week-long compilation, so there is something here for a full period or the last five minutes.
Molly of Denali
12 episodesProduced by GBH Boston with Alaska Native writers, advisors, and voice actors, this was the first nationally distributed kids series with an Alaska Native lead. Molly Mabray lives in the fictional Gwich in village of Qyah and solves problems with informational text: guidebooks, maps, a wildlife camera, an email to a cabbage expert, tracks read out of the mud like a page. Stories run in pairs and carry real culture, from earning a Native name from an elder to a Seal Dance on Atka, a herring egg harvest in Sitka, and the Alaska Native boy who designed the state flag. Two hour-long movies included.
Move to Learn
48 episodesFree five-minute movement breaks from Mississippi's Move to Learn program (The Bower Foundation + the state Department of Education). Coach leads the class through easy follow-along choreography, each routine themed to a K-6 topic -- phonics, shapes, the metric system, geography, the body -- so kids burn off energy and refocus. Press play and move along.
Moving with Miss Tami
15 episodesMoving with Miss Tami is a set of gentle creative-movement and dance classes filmed for young children to follow along with at home or in class. In each session, dance teacher Miss Tami leads a warm-up and then explores one building block of dance: moving fast and slow, smooth and sharp, heavy and light, along pathways and in different directions, or showing feelings and ideas with the body. She names each idea in plain words and demonstrates it so a class can copy her. Best suited to preschool through first grade, these calm, vetted, screen-leads-the-room classes turn dance vocabulary into something children do rather than only hear about.
Mr Thorne Does Phonics
26 episodesMr Thorne Does Phonics is a British teacher's alphabet series, hosted by Mr Thorne with help from Geraldine the Giraffe, that walks young readers through the sound each letter makes. Every short episode isolates one grapheme, shows how the mouth forms the sound, offers familiar example words, and blends the sound into simple words to read. Teachers reach for it to introduce or reinforce letter-sound correspondence in pre-K and kindergarten, whether as a whole-class warm-up or a phonics-center clip. It stays calm and clear, one concept at a time, with a light and playful touch that keeps young children listening.
Mr. Betts' Class
56 episodesUS history set to parody songs, aimed at grades 3-6. Mr. Betts rewrites familiar pop tunes into two-to-four-minute summaries of Jamestown, Lexington and Concord, Manifest Destiny, and Brown v. Board. The harder parts of the story are left in, so Andrew Jackson is both the people's president and the man behind Native removal. Mixed in are straight explainers and discussion pieces: five facts about Columbus, a sorting-out of the Declaration versus the Articles versus the Constitution, and a both-sides look at whether Parliament had the right to tax the colonies. Good for opening or reviewing a unit.
Mr. DeMaio
128 episodesFast, comic explainers from a teacher who took the format to YouTube, most landing between seven and twenty minutes. Two veins run through the catalog. Science curiosities hook a class immediately: tardigrades surviving the impossible, axolotls regrowing lost body parts, bats hunting by echolocation, black holes, avalanches, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Biography fills the longer end, with episodes on Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Alexander Hamilton. A handful are songs, like the twelve months in order. The energy is loud and the jokes are constant, so these earn their keep as a hook or a review rather than quiet independent work.
Mr. Mike!
4 episodesMr. Mike is a paraprofessional who turns everyday classroom social skills into short, kid-facing dance-along songs. He sings a simple, repeatable chorus straight to camera while the target words and actions appear on screen, and most titles add an ASL inset and a first-then-finally picture schedule, the kind of supports a K–2 or inclusion room already leans on. The videos here are the social-emotional core: taking turns and sharing one toy, saying excuse me to share a crowded space, being a good sport whether you win or lose, and using polite, respectful words. Each runs two or three minutes, built to stand up and do together right before recess or a game.
Mrs. Randall's Reading Island
8 episodesMrs. Randall, known as Detective Randall to her readers, hosts short reading-comprehension lessons for elementary classes, most under four minutes. Each one takes a single skill and works it through a story or a real passage shown on screen: finding text evidence to prove an answer, making inferences from clues, naming a character's response to events, tracing the central message, or answering questions with key details. An animated companion named Journey and recurring mystery stories keep young readers following along, and there is a wide bench of phonics, vocabulary, and content-area read-alouds beyond the comprehension videos. Best pulled one skill at a time to match the strategy your group is practicing this week.
Music Lessons with Mrs. Morris
11 episodesMusic Lessons with Mrs. Morris is a working general-music teacher's collection of short, plain-spoken explainers on how music actually works. Each video takes one idea — an element such as rhythm, melody, dynamics, or timbre; a form such as ABA or theme-and-variation; or a broader topic such as harmony or opera — and unpacks it in a few minutes with clear title cards and quick listening examples. The tone is calm and classroom-ready, built to give students a shared vocabulary before they listen, perform, or create. Play one to introduce a concept, then send the class off to try it themselves.
Musication
136 episodesVisual play-alongs made by Jan Vink, a primary music teacher in the Netherlands. Colored notes or icons scroll across the screen in time with the music, so every child sees exactly when to strike a boomwhacker tube, clap, or tap a percussion instrument. The arrangements pull from all over, among them the Blue Danube, Mozart's Alla Turca, Banana Phone, and a Halloween number about black cats. Many tunes appear twice, once as a boomwhacker chart and once as a rhythm or Do-Re-Mi version. Setup is close to nothing: hand out the tubes, press play, and the room performs together.
Mystery Doug
210 episodesEvery episode opens with a question a real child asked, and Doug spends four to eight minutes chasing the answer with evidence. Are mermaids real? No, but sailors long ago probably spotted manatees and let imagination finish the job. Can animals get sunburned? Yes, though fur, feathers, and mud work as sunscreen. Can a mountain become a volcano, can animals laugh, do animals really predict the weather. The answer is often no, which is half the value. Kids watch how you find out rather than collecting a fact. Made to open a science block or start an argument the class can settle later.
Mystery Science
26 episodesVideo lessons from Mystery Science, each built around a question a child would actually ask: could a statue's shadow move? Where can you find whales in a desert? How could you send a secret message to someone far away? The video sets up the puzzle, walks students through observations and evidence, and lands on a hands-on activity. Coverage runs across K-5 science (weather and natural hazards, energy and motion, fossils, animal behavior, chemical reactions), plus short mini-lessons on what scientists actually do all day. Better for opening a unit than for reviewing one.
NASA Documentaries
8 episodesEight documentaries made by NASA itself, running 22 minutes to a feature-length 97. Several are primary-source history: the agency's own account of Apollo 11, a 40th-anniversary look at the whole Apollo program, and Hubble's launch and famous in-orbit repair. Others follow current work, from Perseverance's seven minutes of terror over Mars to the DART asteroid mission and the decades of engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope. The Color of Space steps away from hardware entirely, with seven Black astronauts describing how they got there. Runtimes vary a lot, so check before you plan; the short ones fit a period, the features need a unit.
NUMBEROCK
137 episodesAnimated math music videos, two to four minutes each, one skill per song and the skill named right in the title. The collection is deep enough to shadow most of an elementary scope and sequence: times tables up through twelve, two- and three-digit addition with regrouping, multiplying by partial products, naming flat shapes and solid figures, skip counting in steady patterns. Finding the right one takes seconds, which matters when the warm-up is the only slot you have. Best used just before you teach a skill, or on repeat at a review station where students will end up humming it.
National Dance Institute
97 episodesNinety-seven recorded classes from National Dance Institute, the New York nonprofit that puts professional teaching artists in front of children learning to dance. The library is the NDI at Home sessions: beginner ballet with an emphasis on alignment and moving safely, an Appalachian clog dance broken across four progressive classes, body percussion where dancers clap and stamp their way through rhythm patterns, and Arts Encounter sessions that spark movement from a story or a piece of music. Most run seven to twenty-seven minutes and an NDI artist leads start to finish, so a teacher can clear the desks, press play, and dance along with the class.
Nature Cat
39 episodesNature Cat and his friends spend 39 entries here on whatever is happening outside. Most are two- to five-minute clips built around one natural thing: clouds, fog, caves, mushrooms, soil washing away in wind and water, animals shedding fur as they grow. Mixed in are full 24-minute episodes carrying two stories apiece, and an hour-long movie special in which the gang wins back the pieces of nature a greedy king has carted off to decorate his castle. Several holiday clips carry no science at all and are filed as just-for-fun. All free on the PBS KIDS channel.
Nessy
42 episodesNessy turns the trickiest parts of learning to read, spell, and write into short, singable strategies. This structured-literacy channel, built on the Orton-Gillingham approach and widely used in K-6 classrooms, tackles one rule at a time: phonics patterns such as magic e, ai and ay, and r-controlled vowels; spelling rules for doubling, plurals, and flossy words; and punctuation and parts of speech. Memorable characters and catchy songs make each rule stick, and many of the videos suit dyslexic learners especially well. A short set of number-sense math clips rounds out the collection. Teachers reach for these when one specific skill needs a clear, friendly explanation.
New Victory Arts Break
16 episodesNew Victory Arts Break is the free, follow-along activity series from the New Victory Theater, New York's nonprofit performing-arts venue for kids and families. In each short video a New Victory Teaching Artist guides children through one performing-arts skill: devising a character, giving a puppet a voice, clowning, remixing ballet, house and African dance, stepping, song sampling, and call-and-response. Aimed at roughly ages four to ten, it is a rare classroom-ready source for theatre and dance, two of the arts children get the fewest videos in. Reach for it when you want students up and creating, not just watching. Every lesson streams free and is vetted for classroom use.
Numberblocks
184 episodesA British animated maths series where every number is a character built from that many blocks, so Five is literally five cubes and splitting Five apart is something you watch happen rather than something you are told. Episodes run about five minutes and hold to one idea: meeting a new number and counting its blocks, breaking a number apart and rebuilding it from smaller ones, counting equal groups toward a times table, balancing both sides of a bridge to show what equal means, comparing which is taller and which holds more. Number bonds and place value arrive as pictures long before they arrive as words.
Numberjacks
65 episodesThe Numberjacks are numbers who live behind the sofa and leap out whenever a maths problem needs fixing. Each of these full CBeebies episodes runs about fourteen minutes and hangs on a single idea: cylinders, splitting into halves, sorting when the rule changes, recording data on a chart, the number 3 and its triangles, near and far and next to. The BBC origin shows in the vocabulary, in 'maths' and the occasional British turn of phrase, but the number sense underneath is exactly what a K-2 class is working on. Best as the anchor of a numeracy warm-up or a maths centre.
OK Go Sandbox
36 episodesThe band OK Go breaks down how its videos actually get made, which turns out to be a science and math problem every time. "Needing/Getting" was shot by driving a car past a thousand instruments; "A Stone Only Rolls Downhill" ran on 64 phones at once, and a companion video walks through the planning that took. Other entries cover slow motion as a counting problem, circular motion as spin art, chain-reaction and pitch-matching challenges, a two-part flipbook how-to, and the collaborative "Art Together Now" animations built from drawings kids sent in. The band is candid about how often a take goes wrong, which is half the point.
Octonauts
132 episodesUndersea rescue stories from the CBeebies series produced by Silvergate Media, based on the picture books by Meomi. A crew of animal explorers meets one creature per episode, gets tangled up in its world, and closes with a Creature Report laying out where it lives, what it eats, and the features that keep it alive. The visitors include Adelie penguins, arctic orcas, barracudas, belugas, hatching sea turtles, and a baby gator in a swamp. Episodes run about ten minutes, with a few longer specials. That tidy per-creature structure makes it one of the easiest fits for a K-4 habitats or adaptations unit.
Odd Squad
19 episodesA PBS KIDS live-action comedy in which child agents investigate outbreaks of "oddness," and the math is the case rather than a garnish. Agents measure exactly eight quarts with only a three-quart jar and a five-quart jar. They skip count by 2s, 5s and 10s to win the O Games, sort villains into a Venn diagram by what each one likes, and put a scrambled history back into sequence after a time-travel mistake. Episodes run 12 or 23 minutes, with the 66-minute Odd Squad: The Movie and the World Turned Odd special for a longer sitting. Grades K-4.
On-Stage Basics
4 episodesOn-Stage Basics is a four-part introduction to acting for young performers, hosted by Mr. Ross at the Please Touch Museum. Each short episode takes up one tool of the actor's craft: Position names the parts of a stage and where to stand, Motion shows how posture and movement tell an audience how a character feels, Voice warms up projection and clear articulation with a tongue-twister, and Story turns those skills toward a character by asking what they want and why. Together they walk a class from warm-up to a first performance, one plain, do-it-with-me step at a time.
Once Upon a Time... Life
25 episodesThe human-body season of the classic animated series, the one where Maestro narrates and the cells have faces. Twenty-five full episodes of roughly 24 minutes each, one system at a time: blood and bone marrow, the skeleton, digestion, the heart, kidneys, liver, the lymphatic network, the eye, the ear, hormones, the brain. Others zoom out to how the body repairs itself, and the closing episode follows a whole life from growth to its natural end. Slower and far more detailed than a modern explainer, which is exactly why it holds up for a full body-systems unit.
Operation Ouch!
63 episodesTwo doctors, real hospitals, and a cheerful willingness to look at what is happening under the skin. The titles here range from short clips to hour-length compilations: a tour of the whole skeleton, a deep dive on blood, what nerves actually do, why allergies happen, how bacteria cause infection and how the body's defences push back. Some go behind the scenes in an emergency department to watch a medical team work quickly. Free on the show's official channel and pitched at grades 2 through 6, they pair naturally with a body-systems unit, though the real medical footage in a few is worth previewing.
Our Planet
12 episodesThe Netflix natural-history series narrated by David Attenborough, made by Silverback Films with WWF over four years of filming in fifty countries. Twelve fifty-minute episodes here span both seasons. The first works habitat by habitat: frozen worlds, jungles, forests, coastal seas, fresh water, deserts and grasslands, the high seas. The second follows animals on the move, from wildebeest herds to the journeys parents make to raise young. What sets it apart from older wildlife filmmaking is that overfishing, melting sea ice, and blocked migration routes sit inside the stories rather than in a closing note.
PE with Coach Smith
170 episodesFollow-along movement videos from an elementary PE teacher, built to play on the screen while the whole class moves with it. Three kinds turn up. Locomotor warm-ups call out how to travel across the room and the students watch and go. "This or that" energizers make kids choose and move, themed to holidays, the 100th day, or whatever they are into that year. Yoga and balance cool-downs run five to eight minutes and bring the room back down. No equipment and no gym required, which makes it as useful to a classroom teacher between blocks as to a PE specialist building stations.
PE with Joe (The Body Coach)
45 episodesFollow-along workouts led by Joe Wicks, mostly five minutes long and needing no equipment. He demonstrates every move first, keeps a count, and puts a timer on screen so kids know how much is left. The Activate challenges dress the same five minutes up in a theme: safari squats, pumpkin stomps, a mountain climb, a back-to-school shake-out. The longer ones add a trivia round between sets or a spinning wheel that picks what comes next. There are stretchy, slow sessions too, which work as a cool-down or a quiet reset.
PLUM LANDING
62 episodesShort field videos from the PBS Kids environmental-science project, in which an alien named Plum sends children outside on missions. Ranger Jesse walks a city group through one tree from canopy to roots; Clementine climbs a mountain and finds three different habitats stacked on it; Zuzu and friends play biodiversity bingo in an ordinary backyard. Some are hands-on, like building a watershed on a kitchen counter out of trays and food coloring. Others are games that quietly become ecology, such as playing catch-me-if-you-can somewhere full of hiding places. One to four minutes each, so several fit inside one science block.
Peep and the Big Wide World
101 episodesPeep the chicken, Chirp the robin, and Quack the duck bumble through the questions preK and kindergarten children ask out loud: why do things fall, which bird is bigger, what stays dry in the rain. The animated stories run about nine minutes, and interleaved with them are 90-second live-action clips of real children building ramps and dams, sorting collections, and testing what seeds need. Made with National Science Foundation funding for PBS and narrated in part by Joan Cusack, the series models observing closely and trying things out, which is what makes it sit so comfortably at the front of a science circle.
Peg + Cat
31 episodesPeg has a problem, Cat comes along, and the math is what gets them out. A hundred chickens escape and have to be counted back in; buried treasure gets found by pacing out distances in Cat-lengths; a showdown at high noon stalls because nobody can read a clock. The 31 entries here cover counting to 100, comparing, symmetry, fractions, 2D versus 3D shapes, patterns, and time, usually inside a story with a song in it. Two are quieter, with the math dialed down: how Peg got Cat, and a Broadway musical for Ramone.
Pinkalicious & Peterrific
24 episodesPBS KIDS episodes built on Victoria Kann's picture-book characters, along with read-alongs and one-minute sing-alongs that put the lyrics on screen. Half-hour episodes pair two stories, among them a face-painting booth, a wildly imaginative "dream salon," a cupcake machine that goes gloriously wrong, and Peter practicing until a magic trick finally works. Nearly all of them turn on making something or working out a feeling. Several come in American Sign Language versions with a signer on screen. Pre-K through grade 2: use one as an art-project lead-in, or a sing-along as a sixty-second reset.
Prehistoric Planet
10 episodesTen roughly 40-minute episodes that treat the last dinosaurs like living wildlife, filmed as a nature documentary rather than a monster movie. Each one takes a single habitat (coasts, deserts, forests, freshwater, ice worlds, islands, oceans, swamps, badlands, and a closing tour of late-Cretaceous North America) and follows the animals that made a living there: a Tyrannosaurus swimming his young out to an island, Pachyrhinosaurus herds crossing polar snow, dwarf dinosaurs shrinking to fit small worlds. Because the framing is habitat, behavior, and structure-and-function rather than trivia, it lands squarely on ecosystems, group survival, and how body parts fit an animal's life. Plan a full period.
Prodigies Music
77 episodesMr. Rob teaches a whole class to sing and play using color-coded notes and solfege hand signs. Roughly half the collection is sing-alongs: Hot Cross Buns on just mi, re, and do; the C-major scale by color, number, letter, and syllable; rounds, holiday carols, and 'El Tambor de la Alegria' from Panama. The rest are tutorials for playing a tune on bells, boomwhackers, or piano, from Franklin's Tower to the Indiana Jones theme. Most run one to five minutes. A music specialist can build a warm-up out of these, and a classroom teacher without one can run a whole music block.
Rabbit Ears Productions
37 episodesRabbit Ears Productions turned classic Western literature into beautifully illustrated half-hour films, each read by a famous narrator over an original commissioned score. This Storybook Classics collection gathers the fairy tales, fables, and American legends of that strand: Hans Christian Andersen (The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes), the Brothers Grimm, Beatrix Potter, Kipling's Just So stories, and homegrown tall tales from Paul Bunyan to John Henry and Follow the Drinking Gourd. Teachers reach for these to build reading skills like retelling a folktale, finding its central message, and comparing versions, with a few titles that also open a window on American history. Vetted for grades K to 6.
Reading Rainbow
40 episodesLeVar Burton reads a picture book aloud, then goes out into the world to see it for real, scuba diving after Dive to the Coral Reefs and stepping inside a volcano after Hill of Fire. Each half-hour episode pairs one book with a trip to the place it describes. The 40 here reach across folktales (Abiyoyo, Borreguita and the Coyote), nonfiction (Desert Giant, Germs Make Me Sick!), history (Follow the Drinking Gourd), and family feelings (Always My Dad). Reach for one when you want a read-aloud that keeps going after the last page.
Ready Jet Go!
33 episodesJet and his neighborhood friends Sean, Sydney, and Mindy take space science one question at a time. Most of the 33 entries are four-minute clips from PBS LearningMedia, each settling one thing: why Pluto stopped counting as a planet, what separates an asteroid from a meteor from a meteorite, what Earth's four layers are, why some planets are rocky and others are balls of gas. Longer eleven- to twenty-three-minute episodes send the kids to build model rockets, design a robotic arm to fish a toy out of a crevice, or watch a lunar eclipse on Halloween night. One is a sing-along about craters.
Research for Kids with Detective Booksy
6 episodesDetective Booksy Academy turns the elementary research process into a case to crack. Across these short animated lessons, a trench-coated detective character walks young researchers through one skill at a time: turning a topic into a question worth answering, tracking down trustworthy sources, hunting a page for the facts you need, jotting brief notes in your own words, and sorting what you gather so it makes sense. Each episode names the skill, shows it worked on a real example like the life cycle of a butterfly or a fact about the U.S. Constitution, and ends with a quick challenge to try. Built for grades K–5 doing their first reports and inquiry projects.
Rock 'N Learn
369 episodesRock N Learn has been making sing-along teaching videos for decades and the catalog shows it. Phonics songs for every letter and ending sound, sight-word practice for kindergarten, alphabet videos pairing each letter with two example words, and math sets that put addition and subtraction facts to country music or rap. Lengths swing hard: some clips run two minutes while the complete facts programs pass fifty. Alongside these sit classic children songs with on-screen lyrics and action songs for shaking out the wiggles. Best used the way the old classroom tapes were, with one skill played all the way through, then practiced off screen.
RocketKids
15 episodesRocketKids is a set of short, animated social-emotional and character-education explainers, most running two to five minutes. A rotating cast of kid hosts walks viewers through one skill at a time — calming down when feelings run high, making a fair choice, thinking a problem through, resolving a conflict, or choosing kindness — usually broken into a few concrete, named steps a class can try right away. The tone is upbeat and direct rather than preachy, pitched to the elementary grades. Because each episode targets a single skill, a teacher can pull exactly the one that matches the skill, the morning meeting, or the moment the room needs.
Rosie's Rules
13 episodesA bilingual PBS KIDS preschool comedy about five-year-old Rosie Fuentes, who is just starting to work out how the world outside her family runs. Each half hour holds two stories, and the social-studies idea is baked into the plot rather than announced: opening a slime store means making goods and setting a price, a power outage becomes life before electricity, a car wash running low on water becomes a scarce resource. Others take on maps and directions, sequencing a bedtime routine, why a park was designed a certain way, family trees, and Dia de Muertos.
Ruff Ruffman: Humble Media Genius
22 episodesVery short videos, one to five minutes, hosted by the cartoon dog Ruff Ruffman and aimed squarely at how children use the internet. The best of them make something invisible visible: a sing-along explaining what an algorithm is and why you keep being shown more of what you already watched; search engines treated as detective work, where you choose your words and then check whether the top result deserves your trust; a case for setting the phone down when attention matters most. Also here: a few environment shorts and the "Ask Ruff Ruffman" comedy segments, which are pure silliness.
Salsa
42 episodesSalsa is Georgia Public Broadcasting's Emmy-winning Spanish-language series for kindergarten through third grade. Using puppets, animation, and a warm recurring cast, each 15-minute segment retells a familiar folk tale -- Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Little Red Hen -- entirely in Spanish, so children who already know the story can follow the pictures and pick up the language along the way. The show mixes gentle comedy, songs, and everyday vocabulary (colors, numbers, food, manners) with recurring characters like Niña, the bumbling Wolf, the color-shy Monster, and Salsa the parrot. Unit 1 runs thirty segments, free to stream on GPB's education site with a support-materials packet for each episode. A natural fit for dual-language, beginning-Spanish, and folk-tale units.
Sanford fit
20 episodesTwo kinds of one-minute tool from Sanford fit: guided breathing and quick classroom movement. Each breathing technique gets an animal a child can remember. Bear is for long slow exhales, bumble bee for a hum on the way out, bunny for three quick sniffs when feelings arrive fast, crocodile for belly breathing low and slow. Several of them are also recorded in Spanish for dual-language rooms. The brain-break videos are two or three minutes of follow-along activity to shake out the wiggles. Nothing to prepare; press play mid-morning when the room needs it. Pre-K through grade 5.
Schoolhouse Rock!
45 episodesThree-minute animated songs from the Saturday-morning shorts, sorted into the strands teachers still use them for. Grammar Rock names the parts of speech, with Conjunction Junction hooking clauses like train cars, an adverb shop, and a burst of interjections. Multiplication Rock walks the times tables, including the sevens and the twelves. America Rock explains how a bill becomes a law from the Capitol steps, and Science Rock takes on gravity, electricity, circulation, and where energy comes from. A few money songs cover an allowance and what interest costs you. Short, sung, and almost impossible to forget.
SciGirls
47 episodesHalf-hour episodes in which real upper-elementary girls take on a STEM project with a working scientist or engineer beside them. They build underwater robots and fight buoyancy against thrust, map where bees are thriving and turn it into a data visualization, test wind-turbine blade shapes, sample streams for dragonfly larvae to read water quality, and playtest their own board games until the math underneath is fair. Several are presented bilingually in Spanish and English, and one learns the night sky from Dakota knowledge keepers. What carries through every episode is the redesign-and-retest loop, the part of science that usually gets skipped.
SciShow Kids
539 episodesThe kids branch of the SciShow family, running three to six minutes an episode with a host, props, and a demonstration. Animals dominate, with dogs, cats, bats, reindeer, cows, dolphins, anglerfish, and snakes usually framed as one body part and the job it does. The rest spreads across habitats and how their living things depend on each other, fossils and Ice Age giants, volcanoes, eclipses, the human body, and hands-on demos like dissolving an eggshell in vinegar. Short enough to open a science block or fill the last minutes before a bell, and specific enough that kids can name what they learned afterward.
Science Max: Experiments at Large
25 episodesHost Phil runs a science demonstration at classroom scale, then, as the title promises, maxes it out. A folded paper airplane becomes a glider big enough to ride in; a dry-pasta bridge becomes a huge one; a small drag racer becomes a rocket-powered car. Every 22-minute episode holds to one idea: friction, air pressure, elastic energy, static electricity, balance, electromagnets, simple machines, generating electricity. The oversized rebuild is what makes the physics visible, and it gives a class something to argue about before anyone touches a worksheet. Free on the show's official YouTube channel. Grades 2-6.
Scratch
41 episodesTutorials for Scratch, the block-based coding environment, arranged so a class can start at zero and keep going. The opening videos tour the editor, animate the letters of your name, and draw a sprite in the paint editor. Project builds follow: a hide-and-seek game, a catch game with a score variable, a jumping game with a collision check, a clicker game where upgrades feed back into the score. Explainers cover if-blocks, nesting, and debugging a conditional that misbehaves. Advanced ones reach clones, simulated gravity, scrolling backdrops, and the webcam face-sensing blocks. Most run two to eleven minutes.
Scratch Garden
128 episodesSongs and animation in short bursts, generally two to eight minutes, from the Scratch Garden channel. The teaching videos split between early math (counting and skip counting, composing and decomposing numbers, adding and subtracting) and literacy, where contractions and rhyming words each get their own song. Sitting alongside those are clean-up-and-move videos for transitions and a run of frankly silly ones, including a banana pants anthem and an apple-versus-orange showdown, that carry no academic target at all. Those are what you cue for indoor recess or the last five minutes of a Friday, and the catalog labels them that way.
Secret Millionaires Club
26 episodesAn animated series in which a kids' club runs small businesses with investor Warren Buffett appearing as their mentor. Each 22-minute episode wraps one money idea in a story: a gift shop that tries to sell everything and loses focus, a three-part trip to King Arthur's court that works through spending, debt and repayment, a microloan that gets somebody started, a negotiation that has to be fair on both sides. A few reach further, into copyright and pirated downloads or into how trade connects countries. Written for grades 3-6 and easy to slot into economics work.
Sesame Street
432 episodesSegments and clips lifted out of Sesame Street rather than whole broadcast episodes, most between one and five minutes. Counting ladybugs to fifteen, Abby and Cookie Monster subtracting cookies, position words in, on, and under, the alphabet in several different arrangements including one in Spanish, songs about bugs, oceans, and naming feelings. Longer entries come from the recurring strands: an Elmo World episode spends five predictable minutes on a single idea, and Cookie Monster Foodie Truck cooks a dish from order to plate. Familiar faces do a lot of the work in the youngest rooms, and the pieces are small enough to use one at a time.
Sid the Science Kid
10 episodesTen 25-minute episodes of the PBS Kids preschool science show, each built around one question Sid asks about his own day. Why does Dad wear a mask to paint? Where does rain go after it stops? Are all rocks the same? Sid brings the question to school, and Teacher Susie's class investigates it, sorting rocks by color and texture, testing which surfaces soak up water, watching how heat turns batter into a pancake you can't uncook. The set here leans toward earth science, weather, materials, and health habits like handwashing and sunblock. Good for a K-2 opener when you want kids asking before they answer.
SmartKids
50 episodesSmartKids is an animated series from Yogotars built for Pre-K through sixth grade, where a crew of cartoon heroes turns short two-to-five-minute stories into quick lessons. Across about fifty episodes it ranges widely: naming shapes and numbers, adding and subtracting, growing a garden, the human skeleton, planets and seasons, world cultures and holidays, saving money, musical instruments, mixing colors, and social-emotional topics like sharing, perseverance, and naming emotions. Every episode lists a recommended age range, so a teacher can match a title to their grade. Reach for it as a grab-and-go warm-up or a calm brain reset between activities.
Smile and Learn
116 episodesAnimated explainers from Smile and Learn, an educational-technology company in Spain whose library is built for roughly ages three to twelve. The range here is the widest of anything we carry: ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, angles and changes in the states of matter, antonyms and capitalization rules, the basic rules of baseball, block-based coding taken one instruction at a time, and a substantial social-emotional set that helps a child name a feeling like anger and find something to do with it before acting. Videos run three to eight minutes and hold to one idea each.
Snoopy Presents
7 episodesSeven Peanuts specials, each about 40 minutes, built around a feeling a young class already knows. Marcie is pushed into the spotlight and has to lead as the quiet kid she is. Franklin, new in town, finds his usual ways of making friends falling flat. Peppermint Patty, raised by her dad, feels sidelined by Mother's Day until Marcie widens the definition of family. Lucy starts her own school rather than face a new one, and discovers teaching is hard. Sally defends a flower growing on the pitcher's mound. The social and emotional content is the point here, and it holds up for viewers through fourth grade.
Socratica Kids
25 episodesSocratica Kids is the children’s channel from the educational studio Socratica, offering short, friendly explainers a K to 6 teacher can drop into almost any subject. Narrators and puppet hosts walk kids through earth science like volcanoes, earthquakes, and the moon’s phases; life science from bees and butterflies to how the heart works; and physical science such as magnets, electricity, and batteries. The catalog reaches beyond science too, with early counting, a Peter Rabbit read-aloud, journal writing, and sun-safety and storm-safety lessons. Every video streams free on the official YouTube channel with direct per-episode links. Reach for it when you want one clear concept explained in under fifteen minutes.
Spaced Out
3 episodesJust three clips here, two to three minutes each, from National Geographic Kids, and two of them are about the same instrument. What is Hubble? explains why a telescope orbiting above the atmosphere sees stars and galaxies more sharply than anything on the ground, and How Hubble Works goes a step further into the curved mirror that collects the light and how the images get beamed back to Earth. The third zooms out to the Milky Way, placing our Sun among hundreds of billions of stars in one spiral galaxy. A compact starter for an upper-elementary space unit.
Story Pirates University
38 episodesThree- and four-minute creative-writing videos from the Story Pirates comedy troupe, delivered by a Story Pirates "professor" with a lot of kid-friendly humor. The set splits three ways: writing craft (piling obstacles on a character, building suspense, setting a mystery somewhere spooky, inventing a law and following the consequences), draw-along activities (invent a creature, design a spaceship, build a castle out of shapes, draw an emotional comic), and ensemble warm-ups like the Dome of Compliments. Each one names a technique, models it, then hands it back to students. Useful as a five-minute writing starter or a theatre warm-up.
Story Time From Space
31 episodesAstronauts aboard the International Space Station read children's books aloud and run science demonstrations in microgravity. A NASA-partnered program (Global Space Education Foundation) that pairs read-aloud literacy with real space science.
StoryBots
92 episodesBright, song-driven shorts from the StoryBots, the little animated robots who answer children's questions. The catalog runs wide: one-minute phonics and grammar bits on bossy R, plurals, homophones, and the period; two- to four-minute science explainers on volcanoes, popcorn, the sun and the moon; short biographies of George Washington Carver and Gutenberg; and a few longer full episodes, including a 26-minute look at how colds spread. Nearly everything is set to a hook a class will hum afterward. Reach for these as a review, a transition, or the thing that finally makes a rule stick.
Storyline Online
102 episodesPicture books read aloud by working actors, produced by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, with each book's original illustrations animated behind the reading. Sean Astin takes A Bad Case of Stripes, Sarah Silverman a story told twice from opposite points of view, Al Gore reads William Steig's Brave Irene, and Bob Odenkirk voices a boy who says exactly what he thinks and learns what that costs. Most run seven to sixteen minutes. The range is what makes it useful in a classroom: point of view, honesty against kindness, school integration during the civil rights era, dyslexia, a starling who would rather read than fly.
Studies Weekly
36 episodesStudies Weekly's "Funky Facts" shorts: one or two minutes, five quick facts, done. The 36 here run heavy on animals (bison, octopuses, fireflies, cicadas and their years underground, hippos, sharks), with a side of everyday machines and objects like elevators, microwaves, airplanes, guitars, pizza, and avocados. A few go stranger, like the roundup of real and ridiculous car laws, or the one that sorts pirate legend from pirate fact. Nothing here carries a unit on its own. They are openers and closers. Use them for the two minutes before a science block, or the last two before dismissal.
Super Why!
11 episodesFour storybook characters with reading powers jump inside a familiar tale to solve a problem of their own, then spell out a super-letter word to unlock the ending. All eleven episodes we carry are classics: Cinderella, Goldilocks, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, the Three Little Pigs, the Ugly Duckling, and four Aesop fables. Each runs about 24 minutes and pins the tale to a feeling a young child recognizes, whether that is being left out, being afraid of somebody bigger, or feeling different from everyone else. The retellings stay gentle; the wolf and the witch never turn frightening.
TED-Ed
18 episodesAnimated explainers built around a single question and a named expert, usually four to six minutes long. What we carry leans hard toward life and earth science: how animals see in the dark, how a dog reads the world in smells, why sloths move so slowly, what a pupil shape reveals about predator or prey, where Earth water came from, why biodiversity makes an ecosystem resilient. A few sit outside that, like where new words come from, or why the Leaning Tower of Pisa has not fallen. Short enough to open a unit, dense enough that fourth through sixth graders will argue afterward.
Tate Kids
97 episodesShort art videos from Tate, the UK's national art museums, aimed straight at children rather than at adults visiting a gallery. Three shapes recur across the ninety-odd titles here: Becoming an Artist portraits that tell the life and ideas behind real Tate works (Frida Kahlo, Turner, Yayoi Kusama, Yinka Shonibare), looking-and-thinking pieces that ask why some art has shocked people or what art might smell like, and follow-along making activities such as three ways to paint. Most run three to six minutes, which is about right for an art warm-up or a discussion starter.
Teaching Without Frills
81 episodesTwo- to four-minute mini-lessons written and narrated by a teacher, each taking one skill and explaining it the way you would at the board. Reading comprehension gets asking and answering who, what, where, when, why, and how about a story. Writing gets story maps, outlines, and an editing checklist covering grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Research gets the difference between a source being reliable and a source being relevant. The economics set walks through goods and services, needs and wants, producers and consumers, saving and spending. Plain visuals and no music bed. Useful for introducing a skill or handing one student a second explanation.
The Ballet Coach
12 episodesFree follow-along ballet from The Ballet Coach, Sarah Du-Feu, an ex-English National Ballet School dancer. Short tutorials break down one real step at a time -- plié, pirouette, port de bras, balancé -- and story ballets and full follow-along classes let kids dance a whole lesson at home. Press play and move: no experience needed, just a spot to stand.
The Bazillions
15 episodesA Minneapolis band led by two former teachers, Adam and Kristin Marshall, writing two-to-four-minute music videos for classroom concepts and playing them straight, with real guitars and real hooks, openly indebted to Schoolhouse Rock. Most of what we carry is ELA: silent e, the q-and-u friendship, prefixes and suffixes, prepositions, adjectives, similes and metaphors, personification, fact versus opinion, the five W questions. The rest scatters across perimeter and area, classifying triangles by sides and angles, the water cycle, career day, and two songs about friendship and owning a mistake. Reach for one as the hook at the front of a mini-lesson.
The Berenstain Bears
37 episodesEleven- and twelve-minute Bear Country stories, 37 of them, and they come in two flavors. Some are the family ones the books are known for: Brother and Sister break a lamp and tell one small lie that grows, Sister's birthday gets so big she ends up in tears, the cubs decide they will hate the substitute before she says a word. The rest are detective capers and seasonal romps, like a missing pumpkin, a stolen dinosaur bone, a spooky mansion, or a supposed ice monster. Those are filed as fun, with a mystery to solve and no moral attached.
The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!
30 episodesOne- to four-minute clips in which the Cat takes Nick and Sally to see how something works. Half are physical science you can feel: friction on a fast slide versus a slow one, what a bump does to a moving object, a pulley turning a downward pull into a lift, ramps and levers making a heavy job lighter. The rest are animals and bodies, including a cormorant built for diving, a porcupine's quills, what skin does, and the five senses. A few are open engineering problems: get the apple down, patch the hole, build a shelter, feed the alligator from a safe distance.
The Dr. Binocs Show
104 episodesAnimated science explainers from Peekaboo Kidz, the children's channel of Rajshri Entertainment in Mumbai. Dr. Binocs takes a single question per video and answers it in three to eight minutes: how a cactus or a water lily is built for the place it lives, why camouflage and thick fur keep animals alive, what acid rain does to plants and buildings, what bones do besides hold us up, what a black hole actually is. Coverage is heaviest in life science and human impact on the environment, with body-systems topics for older grades. Clear narration, simple animation, one idea at a time.
The Electric Company (2009)
38 episodesThe 2009 reboot: a crew of kids in the Fuego neighborhood with word powers, up against the Pranksters, who delete letters and scramble signs. Most episodes run 22 to 28 minutes, a few shorter. Each one hangs on decoding under pressure and spotlights five or six vocabulary words. A comic-book scavenger hunt teaches individual, opponent, and merit; an election episode covers campaign, poll, and debate; a magic act runs on transform and reptile. Guest stars turn up constantly, from Jimmy Fallon to Samantha Bee to Tiki Barber. These 38 titles are the 2009 reboot only.
The Fixies
42 episodesTiny helpers called Fixies live inside household machines and keep them running, which is the excuse for a six-minute cartoon explaining how the machine works. A battery stores energy and pushes it around a circuit; a compass holds a magnet that lines up north; a combination lock stays shut until the numbers land; a text message crosses the country in seconds; a bent drainpipe blocks the smell. Some go further afield: friction, horsepower, static electricity on a balloon, a rover on Mars, where the trash actually goes. A few are just story episodes with no science in them.
The Juicebox Jukebox
16 episodesOriginal kids songs posted free on YouTube, two to five minutes apiece, and the catalog divides cleanly in half. The learn-along tracks teach one thing each: the alphabet, counting in order, skip-counting by twos, naming shapes, naming colors, opposite pairs, fruits and vegetables, what each art supply does. The character tracks work the other side of the day, covering bravery, kindness, patience, gratitude, cleaning up, and being one of a kind. A couple of holiday numbers belong to neither. Use the first group as a warm-up or review inside a lesson and the second at morning meeting or a reset.
The Learning Station
433 episodesClassroom action songs, movement and dance songs, and brain-break energizers from The Learning Station -- a decades-long early-elementary favorite. Kids get up and move to the music while a handful of songs sneak in the alphabet, counting, rhyming, shapes, feelings and healthy habits. Press play, clear a little space, and let the class shake out the wiggles and refocus.
The Magic School Bus
52 episodesTwenty-six-minute animated episodes in which Ms. Frizzle's bus shrinks, burrows, or launches so the class can see a science idea from the inside. They ride through Arnold's digestive system, shrink into a circuit to find the break, tour the planets after a planetarium trip goes sideways, and stand in a desert Phoebe was sure was empty. Every episode is built the same useful way: a wrong guess, a field trip that tests it, a corrected idea. That makes it a clean model for how investigating actually works. Elementary science across life, earth, physical, and space topics.
The Magic School Bus Rides Again
30 episodesThe sequel series, with Ms. Frizzle's sister taking over the class and the bus still shrinking, flying, and traveling on demand. Standard episodes run 24 minutes; a few specials stretch to 44. The 30 here spread wide: the nervous system and DNA, ocean zones and camouflage, renewable energy and time zones, coding a stubborn basketball robot, engineering a shelter against a windstorm. "Ready, Set, Fail!" is the one to keep in your back pocket. It is a build that keeps going wrong until the class works out that failing and retrying is the design process, not a detour from it.
The Prime Radicals
18 episodesThe Prime Radicals is a Canadian math show where Uncle Norm and a crew of sharp kids called the Rads chase down everyday number problems. Season 1 runs as fifteen-minute stories: a wobbly stack of golf balls becomes a lesson on patterns, a mix-up over cubic metres of soil turns into measuring volume, and a broken teeter-totter teaches balance. Season 2 boils each idea into a short, catchy math song about fractions, telling time, capacity, magic squares, and more. Reach for it in grades 1 through 5 when you want a real-world hook before math or a quick sing-along warm-up. Every clip streams free on YouTube.
The Singing Walrus
121 episodesPreschool and primary songs of three to six minutes, mixing letter work with numbers and movement. On the literacy side, a straightforward phonics alphabet pairs every letter with its most common sound, while an ABC lullaby slows the same sequence down to quiet-time pace. Elsewhere: counting to one hundred against an on-screen hundreds grid, naming solid shapes, animal sounds, colors with the lyrics on screen. Several are simply classroom utilities, like an action song of jump, spin, wiggle, freeze, and a clean-up song that turns tidying into a group job. A dependable well for kindergarten routines and quick brain breaks.
Theatre Magic
3 episodesTheatre Magic is a three-part series from Esplanade's Offstage strand that introduces the technical elements of theatre through a friendly mascot named PIP. Each short episode takes up one backstage tool: Lights, Colours, Magic explores how a colour of stage light sets a mood, from red for danger to blue for sadness; Shadow Play turns a single lamp and everyday objects into shadows that grow, shrink, and change how a scene feels; and The Invisible Power of Sound reveals sound designers, soundboards, and Foley effects made from real objects. Every episode names the element on screen, shows it working on a real stage, and ends with a hands-on trick a class can try.
Things You Wanna Know
5 episodesEvery title here is a two-minute Cool Facts About rundown from National Geographic Kids, and the catalog holds five of them: cats, monkeys, sharks, snakes and lizards, and roller coasters. Four are animal profiles built on senses and body plans, covering a cat's night vision and righting reflex, a shark's streamlined body and keen senses, the scaly skin reptiles rely on, and the hands and tails monkeys use socially. The fifth trades biology for physics and explains how hills, loops, and gravity produce the feeling of speed. Fact-dense and very short, so they work best as a hook or a five-minute filler with a question attached.
Tiny Teaching Tube
31 episodesShort animated grammar lessons for the elementary years, each one taking a single convention and working it through with labeled examples and a quick end-of-video quiz. The catalog covers the building blocks of a sentence (subjects and predicates, complete sentences versus fragments, simple and compound sentences), then widens to nouns, pronouns, verb tense and subject-verb agreement, articles and prepositions, contractions, abbreviations, prefixes, homophones, and the punctuation marks that end and separate ideas. A host leads each lesson directly, so a teacher can drop one in to introduce a skill or to review before independent practice. Most run three to eight minutes.
Try This!
6 episodesA set of six National Geographic Kids demo shorts, each about a minute or two, showing a trick built from everyday materials. A card holds water in an upside-down glass because air pushes up harder than the water pushes down. A peeled egg slides into a bottle. Hydrogen peroxide plus a catalyst erupts as a foaming column of elephant toothpaste. Markers on a spinning platform draw looping spirograph patterns, and careful camera angles make a small object look enormous. Most are quick enough to show twice, once to watch and once to ask what force is doing the work.
Tynker: All About Computers
10 episodesTynker's All About Computers turns computer-science basics into short animated stories starring a cast of fuzzy monsters and their classmates. This set gathers the strand on digital citizenship and online safety, the part of the series a class needs first when it starts sharing devices. Sorted from kindergarten up through fifth grade, seven episodes each hand students one idea to hold onto: ask before you copy someone's work, build a password you keep to yourself, tell a scam or an unkind message from the real thing, and know when to bring a trusted adult in. Each runs three to five minutes.
Ubongo Kids
20 episodesUbongo Kids is an animated STEM and life-skills series from Ubongo, a Tanzanian social enterprise, set in the fictional Kokotoa Village. Four friends solve everyday problems alongside talking animal mentors, and every episode wraps a single concept in a story and an original song. Across its seasons it teaches upper-elementary math (decimals, time, statistics, basic algebra), science (circuits, nutrition), civics and economics (voting, saving), and social-emotional skills like goal-setting, empathy, and digital citizenship. Free on the official English YouTube channel and pitched at grades three to six, it gives teachers a warm, music-driven way to introduce a concept through story before building on it.
Well Versed
12 episodesAnimated civics songs, three to four minutes apiece, pitched at two levels. The preschool and kindergarten tracks stay close to the rug: why we have rules, what to do when a friend disagrees with you, doing your part, and how differences make a group stronger. The older songs step up to the actual machinery, taking on what a government does day to day, the three branches and why splitting the work matters, rules versus laws, rights, voting as a fair way to decide, and local government handling the trash pickup and the library. Useful when an elementary civics unit needs something everyone can sing.
Weston Woods Storybook Films
20 episodesPicture books turned into films: the original illustrations animated, the text read aloud, most running six to sixteen minutes. The shelf here is one most classrooms already own in print, including Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, Chrysanthemum narrated by Meryl Streep, Corduroy, Click Clack Moo, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Good Night Gorilla, Harry the Dirty Dog, Danny and the Dinosaur, Diary of a Worm, and Giraffes Can't Dance. Useful for a shared read when your copy is checked out, for comparing a book against its film, or for a listening center. Pre-K through grade 3.
Wild Kratts
16 episodesChris and Martin Kratt animate themselves into creature power suits and go find out what an animal body actually does. Episodes here cover echolocation in bats, the cheetah flexible spine and semi-retractable claws, beaver dams as ecosystem engineering, monarch migration to Mexico, firefly bioluminescence and the firefly that fakes another species flash, wolf pack structure, and a savanna food chain the brothers stage as a giant board game. Four 48-minute movies round it out, including an Earth Day argument over whether oceans or forests matter more. Specific enough to anchor structure-and-function or ecosystems work, with a villain plot carrying the middle.
WordGirl
15 episodesStandalone vocabulary segments pulled from the PBS KIDS superhero comedy, most of them one to four minutes. Each takes one word (confront, evasive, tranquil, repulsive, unruly, compatible, combination, triumph, pestering, eureka) and gives it a scene instead of a definition. Two widen out a little: cavity turns on a word carrying more than one meaning, and the simile segment is a genuine four-minute introduction to figurative language. Order does not matter and no knowledge of the show is required, so these work as a warm-up before a read-aloud, before writing, or whenever second through sixth graders need a sharper word.
WordWorld
41 episodesIn WordWorld everything is built out of the letters that spell it, so a DUCK is shaped from D-U-C-K and a word has to be assembled before it can help anybody. The catalog runs two ways. There are one-to-three-minute clips where the WordFriends sound out and build a single word such as TENT, SHARK, or the letter J, and there are full 27-minute episodes pairing two stories, like Duck crashing through Spider's web and hunting down every scattered letter to rebuild it. Phonemic awareness and letter-sound work with a plot attached, aimed squarely at PreK through first grade.
Work It Out Wombats!
28 episodesThe wombats live in the Treeborhood and solve everyday snags the way a computer scientist would: name the problem, break it into parts, try one idea at a time, adjust. The 27 entries are 13-minute stories, 26-minute doubles, and a handful of two-minute songs that name the moves outright, among them decomposition, patterns, cause and effect, and same-but-different. Episodes cover measuring to get something the right size, running a survey and sorting the answers, following a recipe in order, and riding out a loud storm by breaking the worry into small steps. One is presented in American Sign Language.
Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum
24 episodesA PBS KIDS series in which three kids step through a museum portal and meet historical figures as children. The hook is the order of things. Xavier, Yadina or Brad arrives with a real problem, whether shut out of a game, unable to speak, or unsure how to get anyone to listen, and the visit answers it. Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, Frederick Douglass, Gwen Ifill, Jonas Salk, Grandmaster Flash, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell. Single segments run about eleven minutes and full episodes roughly twice that. Biography that carries a social-emotional thread, so it fits either block.
YouDance
179 episodesFree, ad-free follow-along dance lessons for kids from YouDance. A teacher breaks down one real step at a time -- ballet positions, jazz steps, hip hop grooves, clogging footwork, contemporary movement -- demonstrates it slowly, then invites kids to dance it along to the count. Press play and move: no experience needed, no floor space required beyond a spot to stand.
codeSpark FOOtorials
3 episodeseSpark
3 episodeseSpark's instructional videos are short, single-skill reading lessons built around one Common Core standard at a time. A friendly animated teacher and a cast of young eSpark Readers walk a class through the skill right on screen: naming a book's author and illustrator, sorting what a photograph tells you from what the words tell you, and using a nonfiction book's pictures to find the key idea of a page. Each runs one to four minutes and reads real photo passages aloud as it goes, so the screen leads the practice instead of describing it. A plain, no-frills way to open or reinforce a foundational reading skill in kindergarten and first grade.