Sometimes a discovery doesn't happen in the field — it happens decades later, in a drawer.
In the 1980s, an Antarctic expedition recovered a fossil and recorded it simply as "vertebra of a large reptile" in a field notebook. That single line was all anyone knew about it for the next 40 years.
It wasn't until paleontologist Dr. Mark Evans revisited old research and notes that the fossil was properly identified — as the first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica. Its distinctive shape points to a Titanosaur, the largest dinosaur to ever walk the Earth.
The bone had been sitting in a collection the entire time. What changed wasn't the fossil — it was someone finally looking at it with the right knowledge asking the right questions.
The Isle of Man Tourist Trophy (TT) is an annual motorcycle racing event held over two weeks in late May and early June. It's widely regarded as the world's fastest and most dangerous road race, and it draws fans from around the world.
Though the race is more than 100 years old, this year's event had some extra excitement. Channing Tatum and Eve Hewson were there filming scenes for a new Amazon MGM movie inspired by the TT. Parts of the film were shot alongside the real races, with film crews mixing in among actual competitors and fans. The movie is called Isle of Man, and Brad Pitt is one of its producers.
Movie stars weren't the only famous faces in the crowd — spectators also included Formula One drivers Oscar Piastri and Mark Webber and cyclist Mark Cavendish. Fans of movies and motorcycles alike had plenty to be excited about at this year's race.
Skateboarding made its Olympic debut as an optional sport in 2020, and it'll become a permanent fixture in 2028. But long before the Olympics caught on, skaters had already found their spot.
Back in the 1970s, London's South Bank was known for something other than tourists and river views: skateboarders, drawn to the smooth concrete and sloped walls of the Undercroft Skate Space. Decades later, an exhibit is celebrating that space — a hollowed-out concrete bowl with a cult following — through art, memorabilia, and film.
The Undercroft is where a generation of skaters learned the sport (safety gear very much included). But for years, this free public space faced a real threat: developers tried repeatedly to shut it down or move skaters elsewhere.
The skaters didn't budge. Their persistence paid off — the space was saved, renovated, and eventually celebrated as a landmark. Today, skaters and BMX riders of every age still roll through the Undercroft, part of a community it helped build.
Deserts look empty. They are anything but.
From the sun-scorched dunes of the Sahara to the scrubby plains of Australia, desert animals have cracked one of nature's toughest puzzles: how to survive where water is scarce, temperatures are brutal, and food is hard to find. In this playlist, you'll meet the remarkable species that call these landscapes home — from the iconic camel and the lightning-fast hawk to the bounding kangaroo and the armored pangolin.
Each clip, drawn from landmark BBC series including Seven Worlds, One Planet and Planet Earth II, puts you face-to-face with real desert survival in action. Some animals store water and energy for enormous journeys across open terrain. Others hunt by night, move in short bursts, or use camouflage so good they practically disappear. Every strategy is different. Every one is extraordinary.
As you watch, think bigger: How do animals adapt to temperatures that would stop most creatures in their tracks? What physical traits make desert life not just possible, but thriving? And how do these species — predator and prey, reptile and mammal — depend on each other to keep desert ecosystems in balance?
This playlist won't just teach you about deserts. It will make you see them differently.
There’s a shark in the water! No, no, it’s good — we promise! The WasteShark is not actually a shark, but an autonomous robot that was built to tackle a big problem: plastic pollution in the water. Some estimates put the amount of plastic waste in the hundreds of millions of metric tons. Between canals, rivers, and oceans, waterways around the world are affected.
To make things worse, marine plastic is a relatively new problem, so the solutions haven’t caught up to the issue. The old methods of putting people in boats to fish out plastic isn’t enough, so Richard Hardiman, CEO of RanMarine Technology, took to the drawing board and built a robot.
The WasteShark is basically a vacuum that cruises around the water and sucks up trash, without needing a person to sit and drive it. It can be controlled remotely or put in autonomous mode, because of its sophisticated addition: software that helps it identify and avoid sucking up items that are not trash. The ducks and fish are very grateful. Despite its sophistication, there are still challenges with developing the robot, since scientists have to figure out how to program it to recognize and act on reflections, currents, and wind.
The shark can gather up to a ton of trash over a 24 hour period, which is just the beginning of what needs to be done to reverse the pollution issue. Luckily, the next step is already in the works: the MegaShark.
Research in Antarctica is important, but it’s not the most accessible place — have fun finding an Uber willing to take you (and your lab equipment) all the way there! Scientists no longer have to rely on foot travel, as they did decades ago, but taking to the air needs a bit of extra thought, because the technology has to work in Antarctica’s severe weather.
A promising solution is a new drone, tested in a part of North Wales known as “Snowdonia,” where the frigid temperatures put the drone through its cold weather paces. The drone has a few benefits — it doesn’t need a pilot on board (so it can go to remote places), it can travel up to 1000 km in one trip, and needs significantly less fuel than a normal plane. It does still need someone controlling it from the ground, but this can be from a computer, at base, perhaps with a mug of hot cocoa.
Researchers Rebecca and Tom will be conducting Antarctic research with this drone, with the goal of using radar on the drone to draw a picture of what’s under the ice sheets, to help predict how fast they could melt.
In Alice Paul and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage, activist Alice Paul leads marches and protests to secure women’s right to vote in the United States. Drawing inspiration from the militant suffrage movement in the UK, she organizes the National Woman’s Party, pickets the White House, and helps secure the passage of the 19th Amendment after decades of struggle.
In Julia Gillard, Education Advocate, listen as the former Australian Prime Minister reflects on her leadership and her work to expand education opportunities for girls worldwide. Drawing from her family’s experience with poverty and limited schooling, she advocates for equal access to education while facing criticism and gender bias during her political career. This video is excerpted from BBC's Her Story: The Female Revolution, which explores the history and impact of women’s rights movements and achievements of women.
Bluey's had Peddly since she was two! Talk to your class about how to appreciate what you have through the Bluey episode "Pizza Girls." The lesson includes printables for two activities in which kids draw and write about something old at their house that they love and complete a STEM challenge to make a bridge (to deliver pizzas, of course!)
Pizza Girls Episode Summary: Bluey and Bingo are making mud pizzas and delivering them to the grown-ups, but their pedal car’s wheel keeps falling off!
Watch the episode here! (Click here to watch in Australia.)
If everyone was the same, life would be boring! Try this lesson, which uses the Bluey episode "Mini Bluey" as the kickoff to a classroom conversation about the importance of being yourself. The lesson includes printables for three activities in which kids complete a same or different worksheet with a partner, write compliments to each other, and draw what they're good at.
Mini Bluey Episode Summary: When Dad complains about how dissimilar Bluey and Bingo are, Bluey hatches a plan to make them more alike and happily introduces Mini Bluey!
Watch the episode here! (Click here to watch in Australia.)
In Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, learn how the colonies made the case for independence from Britain during the Revolutionary War. A Committee of Five, including Thomas Jefferson, drafted the document, drawing on ideas from the Virginia Declaration of Rights and John Locke. The Declaration outlined reasons for independence, the philosophy behind it, the king’s offenses, and concluded with the resolution for freedom. It was approved on July 4, 1776, and its original draft is now on permanent display in Washington, D.C.
On February 17, 2026, the Lunar New Year begins and the Year of the Horse gallops in! Introduce this holiday — celebrated in East and Southeast Asia and in Asian communities all around the world — to your primary students with a reading passage that explains Lunar New Year and fun Chinese Zodiac activities.
- Lunar New Year and the Chinese Zodiac (reading passage) invites students to explore the origins of the Chinese Zodiac, learn how the lunar calendar works, and discover the legendary animal race that gave each year its zodiac sign. Along the way, students explore how zodiac animals are believed to connect to personality traits and Lunar New Year traditions.
- Meet Your Chinese Zodiac Animal (student activity) has students to put their learning into action by finding their own zodiac sign, reflecting on its characteristics, drawing their animal, and comparing traits with a classmate. Together, these activities encourage students to read, think, and celebrate the Lunar New Year in a fun and meaningful way.
Sometimes a discovery doesn't happen in the field — it happens decades later, in a drawer.
In the 1980s, an Antarctic expedition recovered a fossil and recorded it simply as "vertebra of a large reptile" in a field notebook. That single line was all anyone knew about it for the next 40 years.
It wasn't until paleontologist Dr. Mark Evans revisited old research and notes that the fossil was properly identified — as the first dinosaur bone ever found in Antarctica. Its distinctive shape points to a Titanosaur, the largest dinosaur to ever walk the Earth.
The bone had been sitting in a collection the entire time. What changed wasn't the fossil — it was someone finally looking at it with the right knowledge asking the right questions.
The Isle of Man Tourist Trophy (TT) is an annual motorcycle racing event held over two weeks in late May and early June. It's widely regarded as the world's fastest and most dangerous road race, and it draws fans from around the world.
Though the race is more than 100 years old, this year's event had some extra excitement. Channing Tatum and Eve Hewson were there filming scenes for a new Amazon MGM movie inspired by the TT. Parts of the film were shot alongside the real races, with film crews mixing in among actual competitors and fans. The movie is called Isle of Man, and Brad Pitt is one of its producers.
Movie stars weren't the only famous faces in the crowd — spectators also included Formula One drivers Oscar Piastri and Mark Webber and cyclist Mark Cavendish. Fans of movies and motorcycles alike had plenty to be excited about at this year's race.
Skateboarding made its Olympic debut as an optional sport in 2020, and it'll become a permanent fixture in 2028. But long before the Olympics caught on, skaters had already found their spot.
Back in the 1970s, London's South Bank was known for something other than tourists and river views: skateboarders, drawn to the smooth concrete and sloped walls of the Undercroft Skate Space. Decades later, an exhibit is celebrating that space — a hollowed-out concrete bowl with a cult following — through art, memorabilia, and film.
The Undercroft is where a generation of skaters learned the sport (safety gear very much included). But for years, this free public space faced a real threat: developers tried repeatedly to shut it down or move skaters elsewhere.
The skaters didn't budge. Their persistence paid off — the space was saved, renovated, and eventually celebrated as a landmark. Today, skaters and BMX riders of every age still roll through the Undercroft, part of a community it helped build.
Deserts look empty. They are anything but.
From the sun-scorched dunes of the Sahara to the scrubby plains of Australia, desert animals have cracked one of nature's toughest puzzles: how to survive where water is scarce, temperatures are brutal, and food is hard to find. In this playlist, you'll meet the remarkable species that call these landscapes home — from the iconic camel and the lightning-fast hawk to the bounding kangaroo and the armored pangolin.
Each clip, drawn from landmark BBC series including Seven Worlds, One Planet and Planet Earth II, puts you face-to-face with real desert survival in action. Some animals store water and energy for enormous journeys across open terrain. Others hunt by night, move in short bursts, or use camouflage so good they practically disappear. Every strategy is different. Every one is extraordinary.
As you watch, think bigger: How do animals adapt to temperatures that would stop most creatures in their tracks? What physical traits make desert life not just possible, but thriving? And how do these species — predator and prey, reptile and mammal — depend on each other to keep desert ecosystems in balance?
This playlist won't just teach you about deserts. It will make you see them differently.
There’s a shark in the water! No, no, it’s good — we promise! The WasteShark is not actually a shark, but an autonomous robot that was built to tackle a big problem: plastic pollution in the water. Some estimates put the amount of plastic waste in the hundreds of millions of metric tons. Between canals, rivers, and oceans, waterways around the world are affected.
To make things worse, marine plastic is a relatively new problem, so the solutions haven’t caught up to the issue. The old methods of putting people in boats to fish out plastic isn’t enough, so Richard Hardiman, CEO of RanMarine Technology, took to the drawing board and built a robot.
The WasteShark is basically a vacuum that cruises around the water and sucks up trash, without needing a person to sit and drive it. It can be controlled remotely or put in autonomous mode, because of its sophisticated addition: software that helps it identify and avoid sucking up items that are not trash. The ducks and fish are very grateful. Despite its sophistication, there are still challenges with developing the robot, since scientists have to figure out how to program it to recognize and act on reflections, currents, and wind.
The shark can gather up to a ton of trash over a 24 hour period, which is just the beginning of what needs to be done to reverse the pollution issue. Luckily, the next step is already in the works: the MegaShark.
Research in Antarctica is important, but it’s not the most accessible place — have fun finding an Uber willing to take you (and your lab equipment) all the way there! Scientists no longer have to rely on foot travel, as they did decades ago, but taking to the air needs a bit of extra thought, because the technology has to work in Antarctica’s severe weather.
A promising solution is a new drone, tested in a part of North Wales known as “Snowdonia,” where the frigid temperatures put the drone through its cold weather paces. The drone has a few benefits — it doesn’t need a pilot on board (so it can go to remote places), it can travel up to 1000 km in one trip, and needs significantly less fuel than a normal plane. It does still need someone controlling it from the ground, but this can be from a computer, at base, perhaps with a mug of hot cocoa.
Researchers Rebecca and Tom will be conducting Antarctic research with this drone, with the goal of using radar on the drone to draw a picture of what’s under the ice sheets, to help predict how fast they could melt.
In Alice Paul and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage, activist Alice Paul leads marches and protests to secure women’s right to vote in the United States. Drawing inspiration from the militant suffrage movement in the UK, she organizes the National Woman’s Party, pickets the White House, and helps secure the passage of the 19th Amendment after decades of struggle.
In Julia Gillard, Education Advocate, listen as the former Australian Prime Minister reflects on her leadership and her work to expand education opportunities for girls worldwide. Drawing from her family’s experience with poverty and limited schooling, she advocates for equal access to education while facing criticism and gender bias during her political career. This video is excerpted from BBC's Her Story: The Female Revolution, which explores the history and impact of women’s rights movements and achievements of women.
Bluey's had Peddly since she was two! Talk to your class about how to appreciate what you have through the Bluey episode "Pizza Girls." The lesson includes printables for two activities in which kids draw and write about something old at their house that they love and complete a STEM challenge to make a bridge (to deliver pizzas, of course!)
Pizza Girls Episode Summary: Bluey and Bingo are making mud pizzas and delivering them to the grown-ups, but their pedal car’s wheel keeps falling off!
Watch the episode here! (Click here to watch in Australia.)
If everyone was the same, life would be boring! Try this lesson, which uses the Bluey episode "Mini Bluey" as the kickoff to a classroom conversation about the importance of being yourself. The lesson includes printables for three activities in which kids complete a same or different worksheet with a partner, write compliments to each other, and draw what they're good at.
Mini Bluey Episode Summary: When Dad complains about how dissimilar Bluey and Bingo are, Bluey hatches a plan to make them more alike and happily introduces Mini Bluey!
Watch the episode here! (Click here to watch in Australia.)
In Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, learn how the colonies made the case for independence from Britain during the Revolutionary War. A Committee of Five, including Thomas Jefferson, drafted the document, drawing on ideas from the Virginia Declaration of Rights and John Locke. The Declaration outlined reasons for independence, the philosophy behind it, the king’s offenses, and concluded with the resolution for freedom. It was approved on July 4, 1776, and its original draft is now on permanent display in Washington, D.C.
On February 17, 2026, the Lunar New Year begins and the Year of the Horse gallops in! Introduce this holiday — celebrated in East and Southeast Asia and in Asian communities all around the world — to your primary students with a reading passage that explains Lunar New Year and fun Chinese Zodiac activities.
- Lunar New Year and the Chinese Zodiac (reading passage) invites students to explore the origins of the Chinese Zodiac, learn how the lunar calendar works, and discover the legendary animal race that gave each year its zodiac sign. Along the way, students explore how zodiac animals are believed to connect to personality traits and Lunar New Year traditions.
- Meet Your Chinese Zodiac Animal (student activity) has students to put their learning into action by finding their own zodiac sign, reflecting on its characteristics, drawing their animal, and comparing traits with a classmate. Together, these activities encourage students to read, think, and celebrate the Lunar New Year in a fun and meaningful way.