Jude recently had the pleasure of meeting Miss Donacien and the KS2 pupils at Wix Primary School. Here’s how she got on…
At Wix, I was lucky enough to have a whole assembly to find out what the kids in Years 3 to 6 thought of BrainPOP.
We started by talking about how BrainPOP movies are made and watched the Digital Animation movie where Tim tells us about this.
Once the movie finished, this prompted a discussion about how long movies take to make and how long BrainPOP had been around. I could tell from talking to these young BrainPOPpers they had already watched lots of movies but then I posed quite a hard question…
“What is the difference between someone who just watches BrainPOP movies and a BrainPOPper?”
Everyone thought hard and had excellent suggestions:
- Using BrainPOP at home
- Using BrainPOP to learn
Although both statements are true I thought I’d better explain the difference.
Everyone was surprised to learn I was a BrainPOPper before I even met Tim and Moby.
But how can that be?
“I am so very old,” I explained, “that when I was at school we didn’t have computers. But I used to love going to the library and using books to find out lots of interesting facts, just like BrainPOPpers do.”
However, there’s another important BrainPOP characteristic: I explained that one of the features of a great BrainPOPper is that they don’t just watch a movie and think, “That was interesting.” They watch a BrainPOP movie and think, “I’m going to do something with that information.”
Examples we discussed were watching the Filmmaking movie and then scripting and recording your own movie; watching the Roald Dahl movie before reading his books; or watching the Blogs movie before setting up your own blog.
I had already seen Miss Donacien’s class blog and it made me think what turned out to be true – Wix Primary school is full of BrainPOPpers!
Once I had explained what being a BrainPOPper meant the ideas flowed thick and fast:
- Use BrainPOP at home to research a topic you’re interested in
- Use BrainPOP to help younger or older siblings with their homework (everyone was surprised to hear that BrainPOP is used in secondary schools as much as primary schools!)
- Use BrainPOP with Mum and Dad so they can learn too
Assembly was soon over and there was just time for a quick recap on what makes a great BrainPOPper:
- They love finding out information about lots of different things
- They use the information they have found to go and do other interesting stuff
A couple of days later I saw that Miss Donacien’s class had been blogging again…this time about my visit.
As I suspected, Year 5 proved themselves to be amazing BrainPOPpers, not just finding out information, they used Purple Mash to make their own illustrations about what they had learned.
Will keep an eye on their blog to keep up to date with their adventures.
