Social studies

For a while now I've been looking for good Social Studies videos for us to watch together as a family.  The idea is that we watch 15 minutes or so every day (typically while eating lunch), stopping and starting the videos and chatting together about the topics raised.

But the problem is that either they are "talking head" style, more suitable for teens/adults, or they try to be too "cool", with speedy graphics, silly jokes and fast talkers.  We want something somewhere in between, and that's not easy to find.

A year or so ago we got into Geography Now, which has a country-by-country approach where each 10-ish minute video looks at the main features of a single country (physical environment, people, flag, politics, history, etc).  And while it was both informative and fun (and Mulan and Miya enjoyed watching it), it was still a little too "cool/fast", meaning that I felt that a bit too much of it went over the heads of the kids.  So, I made an executive decision and looked elsewhere (for now).

Next we tried Khan Academy's history series, again watching it daily for several weeks.  We watched the ancient history stuff, and all learnt a lot from it.  But unfortunately, this was too much the other way -- too talking head-ish, and the kids grew to not like it so much.  This time it was Mulan and Miya who informed us that we should try something else.

Our latest find is Crash Course, which so far seems to be just right (though maybe slightly towards the "too fast" side).  Yesterday, we completed watching their World Mythology series, which we all greatly enjoyed and learnt a lot from.  (We chose this topic by a family vote, and we all think we chose well!)

We have also just started Crash Course's Games series (voted for by Mulan and Miya), and while interesting, it doesn't seem quite so good as the Mythology series.  Mostly, we are disappointed at the narrowness of topic.  One with a broad sense of history might expect it to be an examination of games in different societies throughout history, with maybe one or two videos on modern video/computer games.  But actually it is the other way around -- that is, it's mostly about modern video gaming, with just a few videos on the broader history.  Oh well, we are still continuing to watch it (I'm having fun reminiscing about the old games/machines, with plenty of stories of when Daddy was a little boy!).