#Homeschooling Enrichment While Sheltered in Place for COVID-19: Best Of List

To help parents keep their children engaged beyond hours playing Minecraft and Animal Crossing here is our best of list of #homeschooling resources.

ProjectExplorer: Hours of Educational Video Content for Grades 3-12

ProjectExplorer’s mission “is to bring the world into classrooms and living rooms with free video content and curriculum that fosters global awareness and cross-cultural understanding.” For parents looking to enrich their students ProjectExplorer is an incredible free resource that combines educational videos with curriculum and virtual classroom resources. Students home / Teachers & parents home.

Crash Test World: Free Content with Classroom Curriculum

In each Crash Test World story, Kari Byron (former host of MythBusters) “discovers how history, technology, culture and people come together to make their world – and ours – a better place.” Discovery Channel has picked up the series which debuts this Fall – but you can watch individual stories now for free online. This is a terrific resource for students in middle and high school.

Imagineering in a Box: Walt Disney Imagineering + Khan Academy 

Walt Disney Imagineering and online learning leader Khan Academy have partnered up to create hours of educational video content coupled with projects and interactive exercises. The course is free and starts right here.

NatGeo@Home – Inspiring Family Exploration

National Geographic, aka NatGeo, announced their NatGeo@Home initiative this week which pulls together into one place the extraordinary breadth and depth of their educational content for kids of all ages. The site offers up educational video content and projects suitable for kids and families.

#StayHome Bunker Resources Compiled by @carlyewisel

Journalist Carlye Wisel (who has been sidelined as a theme park industry journalist due to the pandemic) has compiled an exhaustive “bunker list” of things to do, resources to help navigate the crisis and organizations to support. The spreadsheet is crowd-sourced and curated by Carlye.

STEM Fun with Dianna Cowern (aka YouTube’s Physics Girl)

Physicist and science educator Dianna Cowern, in partnership with PBS Digital Studios, has created hours of entertaining videos covering all things physics. Dianna’s videos (under her moniker “Physics Girl”) are family-friendly and bring complex physics concepts to life for her 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.

BroadwayHD – Live Theatre at Home

If you are starved for live theatre start by checking out the website of your favorite local theatre – they are desperately in need of donations and may offer streaming of productions that are now lights out. You can also subscribe to BroadwayHD.com to get access to a rich library of live performances filmed in HD. Make Saturday night “live theatre night” with your family from the #StayHome comfort of your living room.

AsapSCIENCE: Explaining the COVID-19 Pandemic (for students)

There is an “infodemic” right now of news and information about “coronavirus”, “COVID-19” and everything “pandemic”, and most is not student-friendly. A terrific place to start for video content aimed at students is the AsapSCIENCE YouTube channel run out of Toronto, Canada by Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown. They’ve published a series of explainer videos related to COVID-19, vaccines and pandemics in recent weeks, using their distinctive (and entertaining) hand drawn animations.

Science Vs: Explaining the COVID-19 Pandemic (for parents)

For adults looking to get past the infodemic the Science Vs podcast is a terrific place to start. Science Vs reset their planned programming and is running a series of shows covering all things COVID-19. 

#StayHome to Stay Safe!

#StayHome is a necessary and very painful challenge for those that are able to do so – to protect our front line healthcare workers and essential services and to flatten the curve of the pandemic. If you have additional resources please share them in the comments.