One of my go-to educational science series has always been The Magic School Bus. Even when I taught elementary school, I’d often check in our school’s media center to see if we had Magic School Bus videos on the specific science topics we were studying each week.
Here’s what I love about them as a parent (and teacher):
- They’re quick! Each episode falls between 24-28 minutes at the most. If we cover a topic in the morning, sometimes I’ll throw on the corresponding episode while I prepare lunch for the kids. You can even let them watch during lunch.
- They’re engaging. My kids are watching other kids learn through exploration and imagination.
- All episodes are available to stream on Netflix!
- For some reason, kids seriously love them. The second I turn it on, they get sucked in.
The series itself doesn’t really follow a particular “order”. I found that anytime I wanted to play an episode, I’d have to look up episode numbers and seasons and then find the topic I wanted. To make it easy on myself (and YOU) I’ve gone through all seasons of the original Magic School Bus series and broken it down first by Life Science, Physical Science, Applied Science, Earth Science, and Space Science. Then I went a step further and found topics within each scientific category. Maybe this is overkill, but for me, it’s made it so much easier to find the episodes I want my kids to watch that correspond to our science units.
If you’d like to get your hands on the FREE printable PDF, click here. I’ve printed a copy out for myself and have added it to my lesson plan book.
There is also a NEW series called The Magic School Bus Rides again (I did not include episodes by topic on this printable, but will try to make one in the future). It’s available on Netflix as well.
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