Parents, these are tough times. Not only are you likely (hopefully) working at home right now in an attempt to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, but you’ve also probably become an unexpected teacher, tracking your kids’ homework and praying they maintain their brainpower while “sheltering in place.” We’re all about Gravity Falls marathons, but it would be nice if our kids were able to absorb some knowledge during these uncertain weeks that isn’t Mystery Shack-related. And honestly, it wouldn’t kill us grown-ups to learn something new either.
Just in case you’re not already adept at drafting color-coded grade-school curricula, we’ve pulled together a few series available on streaming that can expand you and your kids’ purviews. Whether it’s exploring their country’s ancient history or letting them find out if their parents are actually as dumb as they suspect, we have a wide variety of programs to fill in some hours.
Some outlets are already ahead of the curve: Nickelodeon just announced the launch of #KidsTogether, “a global, multiplatform prosocial initiative using its most popular characters and talent to engage with kids and families on tips for staying healthy and also ideas for activities to do together while in the home.” The network is also making its pre-K arm, Noggin, free for the next 60 days, so that kids can enjoy popular shows like Bubble Guppies, Paw Patrol, and Blue’s Clues & You! Washington state’s PBS station, WETA, has a “Stuck At Home Survival Guide,” which contains activities and advice for how to talk to kids about the virus. PBS has compiled a collection of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood videos and resources, like a video about a germ-fighting superhero. (When in doubt, turn on PBS.) And Amazon just announced that it’s making a bunch of shows that were formerly only available to Prime members free for everyone, including original series like Pete The Cat, Costume Quest, Tumble Leaf, Bug Diaries, and Creative Galaxy, as well as some seasons of PBS shows like Arthur, Odd Squad, and the delightful Peg+Cat.
If there are educational series not listed below that you would like to suggest, please do so in the comments. Like we said, we’re all learning.
Our Planet
This beyond-picturesque series, produced in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, uses the silken tones of Sir David Attenborough to navigate wilderness areas that were filmed over the course of four years in 50 countries across every continent. The photography is so impressive, like an issue of National Geographic come to life, that your younger kids won’t mind it isn’t animated, and older kids will hopefully appreciate the mesmerizing natural drama. This eight-episode Netflix series offers valuable windows into little-seen terrains, showing the damage of climate change on the permafrost or the amazing abundance of species prevalent in rainforests. “This is way better than a car chase, because it’s real,” commented one of my fellow viewers as a flock of seabirds went diving into an unlucky school of fish. “Oh, that’s the bird that looks like it’s been divorced three times,” offered another. (Our Planet may also inspire some hilarious in-home commentary.) And if all this glorious footage helps steer your offspring toward an eventual science major, all the better. [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Netflix
Xavier Riddle And The Secret Museum
For a brief gateway into the worlds of historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Amelia Earhart, younger kids (ages 6-10) may appreciate the Calvin And Hobbes-like animation of PBS Kids’ relatively new Xavier Riddle And The Secret Museum. There are shades of From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in this 2019 series, as pals Xavier, Brad, and Yadina find a hidden laboratory in a museum that enables them to time travel, and they visit various notables like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington Carver, and Helen Keller back when they were younger. The voices can get a little cloying for adults, but its refrain—“Kids like you can change the world!”—remains valuable. And why not follow up the Dickens episode with a viewing of A Christmas Carol, or da Vinci with a look at his virtual gallery at the Louvre, or the Julia Child segment with one of her famous recipes? [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Check local listings for availability, or stream on PBS Kids and YouTube
Sesame Street
Did you know that Sesame Street is a pretty effective and evergreen learning tool? Maybe that doesn’t quite register as breaking news, but when you have a 7-year-old with a developmental delay who has ostensibly moved on from Elmo, Big Bird, and the rest of the colorful block, such revisits are a welcome surprise. This month we’ve found ourselves turning to YouTube so that she can hang out with her old monster pals in between “classes.” Now, “Sesame Street play time” has turned into opportunities to build vocabulary, learn about geometric shapes, and get acquainted with the scientific method through music, which helps her retain information in ways that aren’t really possible with “traditional learning” right now. The YouTube channel also has helpful designations like “Songs,” “Shorts,” and the wormhole of “Old School.” One day I’ll have to explain that Janelle Monáe and Nick Jonas are famous musicians and not her English and math teachers, but that’s a lesson for another day. [Shannon Miller]
Availability: Check local listings for availability, or stream on YouTube
Brain Candy
So exhausted that you just can’t make it through the alphabet one more time? Pretty sure you’ve forgotten how to count? Just put your pre-K kid in front of a few Brain Candy videos on Amazon Prime. What the alpha- and number-based videos lack in Sesame Street-level creativity, they make up for in highlighting what kids like: retina-burning colors, a cute dog, and many, many monster trucks. It’s like a board book come to life, a reliable fall back when you just want the littlest kids to focus on the basics for a bit. Eventually dump trucks show up to help with colors and prepositions are examined. It’s not one of those shows parents will be able to stand longer than a few minutes, but 3-and-up kids will likely be mesmerized. [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Amazon Prime
Connections
This program first ran in 1978 (with follow-up seasons in 1994 and 1997), but the grainy texture of these clips doesn’t make them any less fascinating. In Connections, host James Burke walks you through how innovation never moves in a straight line, and how things you would never believe are related are connected in some very strange examples of cause and effect. Burke will start out talking about something like malaria, move on to Galileo, and wind up having a gin and tonic in front of a telescope funded entirely by the sale of quinine. In case you get lost (probable), there’s a helpful midway wrap-up entitled “How did we get here?” Burke’s enthusiasm might spark curiosity even in the surliest teen about how the advancement of horse stirrups led to the dawn of telecommunications. While YouTube clips are spotty, fortunately this entire series has been preserved on the Internet Archive. [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Some clips on YouTube, full episodes at archive.org.
Jeopardy!
Yes, Jeopardy! If you forget to catch the Daily Double every day (the show is still running the episodes it filmed before its virus-related production shut-down), the classic game show is available on Netflix and can easily be turned into a screaming-match trivia contest for your own family. Because sometimes the Jeopardy! gods are kind and toss us an all-ages category like “Young Adult Novels.” And sometimes we realize that our geography knowledge has waned while our middle-schoolers’ has expanded. And some day, our kids are finally going to figure out that we’re not as smart as they think we are, and what better way to find this out than when you’re all watching the greatest-of-all-time Jeopardy! showdown between Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer? If you somehow burn through all the episodes, there are some interactive games on the Jeopardy! website; you can even play it on Alexa (including a teen version) for some valuable non-screen time. [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Check local listings for availability, or stream on Netflix or at jeopardy.com
Word Girl
[pm_embed_youtube id=’PLa8HWWMcQEGSMfwFxjqsyQwRpuqWrL4pR’ type=’playlist’]Word Girl ran for several seasons on PBS Kids (2007-2015) and remains a classic for parents looking for a sneaky way to expand their kids’ vocabularies. Each Word Girl episode contains a valuable new word or two, and depicts terms like “eerie” or “disorderly” in an effective narrative that grade-schoolers are likely to remember. Word Girl’s Becky Botsford is the best kind of hero, a plucky fifth-grader with Superman-like alien powers who defeats various criminals while trying to balance her regular life with friends, family, and school. Parents will enjoy celebrity voices like H. Jon Benjamin, Kristen Schaal, and Patton Oswalt, while kids will gravitate toward Becky’s relatable plights, like getting caught up in another superhero’s bullying. Try sticking the landing by using the episode’s special words in a sentence, then asking your kids to do the same. Maybe even keep a list of words you’ve learned to add more of a sense of accomplishment to your at-home whiteboard. [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Check local listings, Amazon, PBSKids.org, some clips on YouTube
Night On Earth
The flip side to Our Planet is the intriguing Night On Earth, which uses infrared technology to reveal what goes on in the deep of the jungle or at the bottom of the ocean after the sun sets. Spoiler: There’s a lot of feeding going on (the keyword at the top left of the Netflix screen is “fear”), which adds a huge dose of suspense to the nighttime images as predators like jungle cats head out in search of adorable prey. You’ll also spy a plethora of unexpected elements, like a herd of elephants strolling out to take a bath, with the heat sensitivity of the camera revealing a fernlike capillary pattern on their skin. It might be too intense for your youngest viewers, but middle-schoolers and up will be riveted. [Gwen Ihnat]
Availability: Netflix
PBS Native America
This expansive four-part docuseries premiered back in the fall of 2018, but it’s an evergreen watch. It’s a wide-ranging look at the history and culture of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, from South America to Mesoamerica to the banks of the Mississippi River. But Native America places just as much emphasis on the present, reminding us that the descendants of those who survived colonialism and Manifest Destiny are still finding ways to thrive. Interviews with Native American artists, scholars, and authors tap into contemporary issues as well as present-day celebrations. Producers Julianna Brannum and Gary Glassman have balanced the series’ entertaining and educational elements, including bringing the past to life with starkly beautiful animation and a propulsive score. You and your kids are bound to learn something from Native America, and all the gorgeous aerial photography will leave you feeling a little less homebound. [Danette Chavez]
Availability: Check local listings, or stream now through the free PBS portal here, or anytime at the member portal here.
Also check out some previous A.V. Club TV/streaming kids’ guides:
32 Comments
Amazon Prime is AMAZING for history/literature nerds.Horrible Histories: gross-out history for the tweens who loved the book series.Roman Mysteries: It’s basically like Liberty’s Kids, but Roman era, so good for younger kids.All the BBC/PBS. While it requires figuring out what’s age appropriate (and usually is best for tweens and up), the offerings are immense. you can find stuff from Dickens (Oliver! but also the BBC series that more closely follows the novel), Forrester (the Howards’ End mini series is quite good), the Brontes, and all sorts of other British novelists. But they also have series that fictionalize moments in history like Wolf Hall (Henry VIII), The Great Fire (great fire of London, Charles II), Ekaterina (Catherine the Great), etc. My kids have also really enjoyed a bunch of the Chinese and Indian movies on Amazon that fictionalize historical moments.
My 5-year-old is a big fan of Odd Squad, a lightly surreal PBS series about child special agents solving weird crises with math. Said 5-year-old is also kicking ass at kindergarten math, and whenever I compliment her on her math skills, she says something to the effect of, “Duh, Mom, you know I watch Odd Squad!” She even learned about negative numbers, which I definitely could not have wrapped my head around at her age.
I watched an episode of that out of curiosity, and it had this incredibly funny musical number that would not feel out of place in a show made for adults:
There was also an episode that featured a partial reunion of the Kids in the Hall. I believe three of them were in it Crime at Shapely Manor
My 4 year old loves the new Magic School Bus series on Netflix. It’s actually cute and covers some cool topics in ways he understands. My personal favorites are the simple machines and DNA episodes. I’ll also use any time I have to plug Ask the Story Bots. Catchy music, interesting celeb cameos and great lessons, all coming from the JibJab folks.
I loved the classic one when I was a kid, so I was psyched they made a new one. The show and all the learning computer games were so useful. I haven’t seen any of the new one but I like Kate McKinnon so I’ll give it a go for nostalgia’s sake. Hell, it can probably still teach me a lot I don’t know or have forgotten.
There’s a new Carmen Sandiego on Netflix, too, though it doesn’t seem as interested in education as prior versions were. They’ll throw in a requisite geography blurb, but it’s a shame they don’t expand more on the learning over the spy stuff.
My 5 year old loves it and my 12 year old still watches it. He claims he just turns it on for his little brother but we know he totally digs it to on some level. Its a fun show
Odd Squad really is very funny, actually! I’m trying to remember what the humor reminds me of. Douglas Adams? Monty Python? It’s very wacky and surreal. I mean, don’t get me wrong. it’s still just a kids show about basic math concepts, but it’s surprisingly entertaining for what it is.
Yeah, Odd Squad is legitimately fun for adults too. I tried showing my daughter some Kids in the Hall clips after some of the cast was in the Crime at Shapely Manner episode. That’s when I realized that KITH was very rarely appropriate for small children.
“i’m crushing your head” comes to mind but yeahh not a lot else!
I remember watching Connections on “The Learning Channel” back when it was about learning, and not about religious zealots with clown-car uteri.I tries watching Our Planet with my kids, but they were traumatized by the thought of a polar bear eating a baby seal.
Smoke some primo and put on Night On Earth. You won’t be disappointed.
I’ll let my kids know. Thanks for the advice!
Hey we’re all in this together.
These are fantastic shows. But they’re also excellent examples of why it’s unnecessary to “bring school home to your kid.” These shows are filled with messages about empowerment and curiosity and investigation and freedom that are the antitheses of what happens in most schools where the adults tell you what, when, how, and where to learn (and speak and sit and eat, etc., etc.), their approval being your key to happiness, their disappointment a sign that punishment is around the corner.These shows, along with the autonomous learning they inspire, transcend the 19th century authoritarianism of modern schooling.
I agree about Brain Candy. Especially if your child is struggling with their sexuality.
umm…
My 4 year old loves Word Party, which is an animated show on Netflix done by Henson studios – the most recent season includes some mandarin. Her current favorites, though, are that Xavier Riddle show and True and the Rainbow Kingdom. True is sooo much better than Wishenpoof, so I’m just glad to be out of that phase. Obviously, there’s always Doc McStuffins, although season 5 has seriously jumped the shark. I love the look of Tumble Leaf. Not as obviously educational, although I think it has some good problem solving. If you’re looking at older stuff, there’s tons of reading rainbows online.
Also: I’ve tried some nature docs in the past, but they often feature some violent death scenes, and my kiddo gets scared off pretty easily. I remember the Planet Earth stuff being sort of rough in parts. Are these other ones more G rated?
I’d say it’s about the same. They tone back what they can (and have gotten better about censoring the African hunts), but there are still some intense parts that can’t be helped. Full disclaimer, Our Planet 2nd episode features walruses falling off cliffs to their deaths- and they show it. You’ll want to avoid that one. The rest of it is manageable.
Their other series that just wrapped up, Seven Worlds, One Planet, is an easier watch; As long as you don’t mind fish or insects getting eaten, they don’t show many kills. Netflix’s Night on Earth is a bit more violent than BBC’s stuff- they will show the predators win- but its really cool visually
That’s really helpful, thanks! She’s been learning about tundras lately (our last “research topic” of library books before we all went into lockdown), so the Seven Worlds one might be particularly good.
Animal Wonders on Youtube is pretty kid friendly. Wild Kratt’s on PBS is OK, but I’m not sure how I would rate its educational value.
I don’t know if this counts as ‘educational’, but we can show these Gen-Z and Gen-Z+ kids a certain influence on millennials. Mike Judge chiding toilet paper hoarders.
Xavier Riddle led to me watching my 4 year old son tell my mother(his grandma) about Winston Churchill. That show is great.
With Shelter-at-home and not great weather keeping my kids in, we have had a lot of late nights. We finally found the solution to getting my little guy to unwind…..The soothing voice of Carl SaganI have the original Cosmos series on Plex and its magic. I have always loved it but its amazing how Sagan can somehow both draw the attention of a 5 year old at just the right level to get him to calm down and pass out.
Xavier Riddle and Word Girl are seriously good stuff, and I’d also add Odd Squad and Peg + Cat.
For kids who don’t have to have cartoons for everything (and for adults who love history), the YouTube channel Timeline — World History Documentaries is brilliant. They’ve licensed a bunch of documentaries from the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, and PBS (real documentaries, not the ET built the pyramids shit) and they’re available for free. The Hidden Killers episodes are great if the kids love sort of gruesome things.YouTube also has Time Team for your budding archaeologists.If the kids like language, Arika Okrent’s channel has a lot of short videos about weird linguistic things.historyteachers haven’t done anything new for a while, but they have some great music parodies.
Brain Games still comes on, right? We love that one
I want to put in a good word for a couple of other PBS series:It’s Okay to Be Smart – 5-20 minute videos about a wide range of science topics with entertaining visuals and a fun, engaging host.Deep Look – ~5 minute 4k Macrophotography/microscopy of bugs, plants, fungi, and other critters with ASMR-level narration.
The Kennedy Center is posting a daily video from author/illustrator Mo Willems called Lunch Doodles, where Mo shows kids how to draw his characters, make puppets and games, answers questions, and other general Mo silliness. https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/mo-willems/
My daughter (who turns 6 tomorrow) loves Xavier Riddle. She’s now an expert in every historical figure who’s appeared in the show, but she doesn’t know anyone else. Yesterday I told her that FDR is on the dime, and she didn’t care, until I explained that he was Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband.