By Whooo’s Reading Blog Team

Indoor recess, testing, mid-year assessments—this time of year can be chaotic and stressful. With less time to plan than usual, use educational YouTube videos to fill in the blanks. Design a lesson around one of these awesome videos or use a few a week to supplement a presentation you’ve already created.

TED-Ed

You’ll find Ted-Ed on nearly every educational YouTube list for a reason—the library of expert talks they provide is large enough to keep your students busy every day of the week for the rest of the year! Keep students excited with videos like Why are human bodies asymmetrical? and How do we know what color dinosaurs were?

Smithsonian Channel

This channel will likely provide you with more supplemental material than videos for a full video lesson. However, you can find some unique content here that could be great for individual activities, with subjects ranging from cars and jet engines to polar bears and sharks.

Expert Village

Bring learning into the real world with this educational YouTube channel. Students can learn how to raise a dog and take great photographs all within five minutes. Don’t give students free reign of this channel, as on the whole, it’s more geared toward adults.

NPR

Turn to NPR for lessons on everything from politics to health. Students can safely peruse this channel for video content, but may not find a lot of as exciting as it could be, so it may be best for you to hand-pick the videos that make the most sense for your lessons.

Talks at Google

In 2015 alone, Google had more than expert talks around the world. This is the channel where you’ll find all of them. Students will be in awe as they list to talks about “Searching for the Oldest Stars” or watch celebrities like Lady Gaga speak about tech topics.

NASA Johnson

If you have budding astronauts in your classroom, they will be begging to watch more vides from this YouTube channel. They can tune into live broadcasts (and all previously recorded live broadcasts), learn about how astronauts live in space and see what the world looks like from way up there.

Brightstorm

Let other educators do the work for you if you’re feeling overwhelmed by picking class videos from this education-focused channel. Designed for students in high school, videos cover Math, Science and English with mini-lessons from teachers just like you. Students can learn about the parts of an essay, absolute value inequality graphs and electromagnetic waves.

Minute Physics

With more than 3 million subscribers, this is one of the most popular channels on YouTube. Their tagline, “cool physics and other sweet science,” are not just words—each video is accompanied by fun, colorful graphics that make topics like Angular Momentum exciting.

Big Think

This fun channel provides more abstract lessons that can supplement more specific lessons in the classroom. Many topics cover mainstream topics such as our obsession with selfies and presidential debates, while others dig into deeper content such as the Big Bang and mindful daydreaming.

Vancouver Poetry Slam

Get students excited to write by showing them some of these inspiring and impressive performances by writers of all ages. Topics and styles vary from video to video, allowing every student to find something that speaks to them.

Animal Planet

This YouTube channel is home to an interesting combination of videos, and its strength really lies in their playlists, which pull together a variety of 1- to 5-minute videos to completely cover a single topic. Check out the River Monsters playlist, with 89 videos or the World’s Oldest Animal Couples playlist, with 9 videos.

Computer History

This channel, managed by the Computer History Museum, is perfect for your next STEM lesson. With intriguing videos about technology and our current tech startup culture, students will get a real-life glimpse into the world of computers and tech.

BookTV

Students will love hearing authors of their favorite novels talk about their writing. It may take some time to dig through the videos and find a few that your students will like, but the one you choose could be the inspiration one of your student’s needs to write more.

Wordsoftheworld

This interesting YouTube channel discusses the most popular and familiar words in the English language today, digging up the history and true meanings behind them. Find a video for at least one vocabulary word every month—students will get excited when video time comes around each month.

The Culinary Institute of America

This is a must-watch channel for any budding chefs in your classroom. Dig through their large library of videos to find cooking demonstrations and informational pieces of about protein and New York state apples.

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