BBC Schools Science Clips

 

 BBC School Science Clips is a free interactive website.  It covers topics with in a variety of clusters from the elementary science curriculum, grades 1 to 5.  The site provides students with the opportunity to participate in virtual experiments and manipulate models.  Topics are categorized by age group, and each age group has six activities that cover various outcomes.  The activities can be used as an introduction to a topic, or as way to allow students to explore concepts that have already been discussed in the classroom.

Visually this site is definitely attractive to students.  Though the graphics are simplistic, the addition of some animation seems to thrill my class.  The experiments in Science Clips are often ones that would be time consuming or unsafe to try in our classrooms, even as a demonstration.   Here students are able to independently explore and manipulate objects, test materials, and heat and cool solids to observe how they change.  When students are given the option of exploring the site on their own, is it not surprising that many of them gravitated towards the lesson on Characteristics of Materials.  Even when it's “only” virtual, many of them enjoyed being able to make glass shatter, sound effects and all, when testing its strength.

The site is pleasing to look at, easy to navigate and provides enough interaction to sustain engagement, but the thing I enjoy about this site are the little extras.  The instructions and questions for each activity are thoughtfully worded providing students more exposure to scientific language.  But the reason why I will come back to this site more than once in a year is because of the audio support.  Each instruction, and both the questions and answers in the quizzes, have audio links that will read the question to the student.   That means that the activities are accessible students, regardless of reading ability.  When students are on this site, I can circulate and see all students interacting with the website, rather than some staring at their screens waiting for me to get there so I can read the text to them. The only potential drawback to this site that I have seen is that because this is a British-born website, some of the terminology may be unfamiliar to Canadian students.  For example a green lolly on the website is a green lollipop and since the picture doesn't make that apparent, a brief moment of pre-teaching is requires.