What's Onomatopoeia Mean? - Another Question from My Daughters

Every night my daughters (ages 4 and 5) ask us all kinds of interesting questions. Some of them are about things that I haven't thought about in a long time. Some of them aren't easy to answer in a way that they can understand. And some of them are a bit of both. That was case one night last week when my five-year-old asked, "what's onomatopoeia mean?" I did my best to explain that it is a word like "moo" that is created from the sound that it makes. 

After dinner and my somewhat unsuccessful explanation of onomatopoeia, I turned to YouTube to try to find a video that might help my daughters better understand what onomatopoeia is. That's where I found this cute and short music video about onomatopoeia. I'll warn you, the song is kind of catchy (if you're a five-year-old). 

On a related note, Next Vista for Learning hosts a great video explanation of onomatopoeia. The video was produced by a high school student for one of Next Vista's many student video creation contests.

Explain It Like I'm Five - Cute Explanatory Videos from Reddit and Donors Choose

Reddit has started to produce a new series of cute explanatory videos sponsored by Donors Choose. The videos feature two adults trying to explain complex topics to five year old children. So far three videos have been added to the series. Those videos cover the stock market, Syria, and Existentialism. I've embedded the stock market video below.


Applications for Education
While watching these videos I was reminded of a project that one of my colleagues used to do with his ninth grade social studies students. He had his students create simple picture books to explain things like supply and demand to fourth grade students. That same idea is used in the Reddit videos and you could have high school students create similar videos to explain topics to elementary school students.

If you need a video production tool, give WeVideo or Pixorial a try.

H/T to TechCrunch.

Video Explanations of IPOs

Your students may have heard that Facebook is going to make an IPO sometime soon. If they haven't heard that or if you haven't heard that, check out today's episode of CNN Student News. Your students might be wonder, what is an IPO? Here are a couple of videos explaining the answer to that question.

The YouTube channel Investopedia has a bunch of videos explaining financial topics. Included in their list of videos is a one minute explanation of IPOs.



Another YouTube channel offering simple explanations of financial topics is Finance Guy Video. Finance Guy Video uses the iPad app Show Me to create short whiteboard lessons. His explanation of IPOs, embedded below, includes the recent examples of LinkedIn and Zillow IPOs.