Sunday, February 1, 2009

PBS Evolution series

We have had great success this school year using documentaries (and some fictional movies) to learn about history. And despite the number of print resources I've found on evolution, I'm having trouble finding a way to go over this material together with the kids. So I did a quick search for a document series and came up with the 8-part DVD set from PBS. I've got it on reserve at the library, so after we watch it I'll put a quickie review on the link at my Amazon store. But from the reviews I've already read, it looks perfect for our purposes.

In the meantime, there's a companion website at PBS with web activities, video clips and more.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I'd love to know what documentaries and movies you used to teach history, or where you discovered them.

Anonymous said...

Hi Monty --

Hope you don't mind, but since I didn't have them written down I just created a new Amazon store (http://astore.amazon.com/historymoviesforhomeschoolers-20
) so I could link to titles as I thought of them. We actually watched most of these within the last year -- didn't realize how many movies there were! Keep in mind these are for middle school/high school age. If I think of any more titles I'll add them. I know we watched some generic series that's not really worth recommending. The only movie on this list that I bought (instead of checking out from the library) is Conquistadors. I see host Michael Wood has several series going on PBS right now. A few we saw in theaters.

Also keep in mind this is a highly subjective list. The topics we were covering were "modern history" (civil war to present) and current events, including the economy, Middle East, etc.

One other resource to check out is called "Teach with movies." http://www.teachwithmovies.org/index.html
Although you have to join to get their teaching guides, you can browse their listings for free to get ideas of movies to use for particular topics.

Hope this helps!

Unknown said...

Thanks so much!