Teaching Tool Tuesday - Netflix

Don’t tell, but my wish lists at Lakeshore Learning and Amazon are much longer than the one I have at Endless.com. Honestly, I’m a complete sucker for books and educational games, software and toys. But this past year I’ve honed my ability to discern which tools will be fun once or twice and which ones we'll use over and over . . . and I’ll be sharing our favorites with you every Tuesday.  

Oh, I am so lucky my blog is on West Coast time. Because right now it's about 2AM on Wednesday and I still haven't written my Teaching Tool Tuesday piece. Rough day + work deadline = not enough time to blog. Of course, rough day + work deadline + staying up to write a blog post = way too little sleep. But that's okay. I blew my shot at a decent night's sleep hours ago.

Anyway, I'm sure my Netflix membership seems like an odd choice for a teaching tool, but let me explain. My kids love movies (okay, we all love movies), and they learn so much from the educational DVDs we have. But of course, you can only buy so many educational DVDs.

So after a friend told me about all the great movies they check out at the library, I dashed into our local library branch asking where I could find the movies. And they told me "Blockbuster". Turns out that the Seminole Country library system doesn't have movies, although most of our neighboring counties do. Strike two.

When I decided to do an ocean unit for fall, I remembered seeing an IMAX movie advertised at the science center a while back. I looked it up on Amazon to see if it's something I might want to buy, but on a whim, decided to check Netflix as well. Sure enough, they had it!

Deep Sea: IMAX will be arriving this week, just in time for the start of school - and I found a number of other "ocean" movies there, too. Can't wait to spend some time checking out the other documentaries to see what else might work for our homeschool classroom!