As many of you know I love to use unitedstreaming video clips (www.unitedstreaming.com). Using short video clips at the beginning of lessons is a great way for teachers to spark student interest and increase motivation to learn. It is also a great way for teachers to tap into their student’s prior knowledge and therefore improve reading comprehension.

However, there is something else I use unitedstreaming for…to introduce new units.

No, that’s not the teaching tip

The teaching tip is…don’t be afraid to use video clips that are designed for younger audiences when teaching new topics and/or concepts.

Last week I had a colleague of mine ask me how I was going to introduce our new unit: “The Constitution in a New Nation”.

I told her that since we just had a long winter break I was going to show two short video clips…one 4-minute clip that was going to be a review of what did the first half of the year and one 4-minute clip that was going to preview what I was going to teach in this upcoming unit.

She agreed, but said all she could find were videos geared for 2nd grade through 5th grade (we teach 8th grade).

My response was…”Those are perfect!”

Why?

Too often teachers, and therefore students, get bogged down with too many details and facts and unfortunately lose sight of the “big picture”. When introducing new units I always want to make sure the students understand the “big picture” of the unit.

Video clips that are geared for younger audiences are perfect for that because they usually just give a generally overview without getting bogged down with too much detail.

This is exactly what I did yesterday. Granted, I did not tell my students that I was using an elementary video clip to teach middle school. Nevertheless, the results were exactly what I wanted…the students got a general overview of the upcoming unit with out getting too bogged down with facts, and as video usually does…it sparked the student’s interest to want to learn about the topic.

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