POPtalk

Love is in the air this Valentine’s Day…or is it?

Well, we love BrainPOP (obviously) and loooove Tim & Moby so we penned a little something for the romance of it all. Ah, the robomance!

Sonnet BP, Shall we watch Tim & Moby at school today?

Shall we watch Tim & Moby at school today?
He art so orange and robotic.
A ticking clock could stop our BrainPOP play,
For English lessons hath all too few minutes.
Sometimes our time is too confined,
And often is Moby’s gold complexion dimmed;
And off we must go to other lessons,
No BrainPOP there, because it’s gym.
But Moby’s gold complexion shall not fade
Nor lose possession of his funny ways;
Nor shall a slow server keep him down,
For Tim & Moby like to keep it short,
So long as we have 5 minutes spare,
Tim & Moby can show us Poetry with flair.

Not a robomantic? You can view all of these fab and totally unrobomantic movies all rather tenuously linked to the big V day…

Heart – we all have one, and they’ll be dotted about here, there and everywhere this week so why not watch the movie and let Tim & Moby tell you how it all works.

Poetry – let Tim & Moby give you the poetry low-down. Bonus points if you spot the sci-fi reference. Poetry isn’t always robomantic.

William Shakespeare – he not only authored 154 sonnets, but he gave us Romeo, Juliet, Henry V and Richard III, and they all get name dropped in our movie by our favourite pair.

Venus – the Greek goddess of love and beauty (and also a planet you can learn about today on BrainPOP!)

Pollination – last but certainly not least, what is love without the birds and bees?

Thanks for reading. Why not let Moby know you love him too? Post a valentine’s message on our Facebook fan page and we’ll make sure he gets it.

He may even respond. Though, we can’t guarantee he’ll pen you an ode.

What is our featured movie?

The featured movie is always free – to anyone who visits BrainPOP UK, not just subscribers or those on a free trial.

It appears on our front page and is kind of a “spotlight” movie. Today we changed it from the long standing “Swine Flu” movie to the enlightening “Surrealism” movie. We try to change it regularly as we can. Or remember

How do we choose what gets to be a featured movie?

It really does depend. We usually check the days headlines by visiting BBC news and the brilliant CBBC Newsround website and see if there’s been any interesting stories that might come up in the classroom. We also try to tie featured movies into events and topics e.g. Pi day.

Here are some we chose in the last few months (you may need to be logged on to view some of these movies):

• Satellites – when American and Russian satellites collided
• William Shakespeare – to celebrate National Children’s book week
• Email & IM - when we reached our 100th follower on Twitter (but we can’t remember who it was!)
• Floods – due to flooding in North Dakota (these photos are amazing!)

Once we even made our “Sun” movie the featured movie simply because it was a lovely sunny day outside. And why not?

If nothing in the news or around us seems appropriate we’ll usually turn to you guys and ask.

A good way of doing that is to turn to our Twitter crowd to see if there’s any teachers on there that can be helped out by one of our movies.

For example @stevebob79 recently asked:

We reckoned we could help out so we said…

“@stevebob79 We’re very proud of our Blog movie for KS2. Would make a cracking starter. I’ve made it free, just for you: http://bit.ly/ePnGA“

So the Blogs movie became our (free) featured movie because @stevebob79 had a need for one. Simples. He also suggested a way we could tweak it to make it more effective which we did.

Our tweet was also spotted by another one of our followers, @HGjohn, who said:

In fact, HGjohn (John Sutton of CreativeICT blogs fame) went on to mention us and the movie as a recommended resource in his newsletter. Peter Rafferty (@Raff31) also said:

As my Granny said, if you don’t ask, you don’t get!

So there you have it for the humble featured movie. If you want to suggest a featured movie that you can use with your class we are all ears.