Meet the extreme survivors. Penguins, giraffes, golden snub-nosed monkeys, Namaqua chameleons — these animals have evolved remarkable ways to endure some of the harshest conditions on Earth. We've put together a collection of BBC video clips all about extreme survivors (see Related Resources below). Watch them, then take the Kahoot to see what stuck.
The adaptations are wide-ranging: penguins withstand sub-zero temperatures, giraffes manage naturally high blood pressure, snub-nosed monkeys huddle together to survive freezing nights, and Namaqua chameleons shift skin color to beat the heat of the day. Explore how these animals have adapted, body and behavior, to survive against the odds.
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.
A total lunar eclipse happens when the Earth moves directly between the Sun and the Moon, blocking sunlight from reaching the Moon’s surface. During the eclipse, the Moon can appear dark red or copper-colored as sunlight bends through Earth’s atmosphere.
Even though the Moon travels around Earth about every 28 days, total lunar eclipses are rare. That’s because the Moon’s orbit is tilted slightly, so most months, the Moon passes a little above or below Earth’s shadow instead of through it. Only every six months or so are the Sun, Earth, and Moon lined up closely enough for a possible lunar eclipse.
Last September, millions of people around the world watched the rare event during organized watch parties and backyard gatherings. Astronomers encouraged people to bring blankets, snacks, and telescopes to enjoy the nighttime spectacle together. While cloudy skies blocked views in some places, observers across parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia were able to see the eclipse from beginning to end under clear skies.
In Throwing Fire for Chinese New Year, iron metal workers in Nanquan, China, create amazing, glowing art with molten metal. Today, they perform nightly, but the tradition goes back hundreds of years. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Chinese New Year: The Biggest Celebration on Earth, a documentary series detailing the world's largest annual human migration (Chunyun), where over 1.5 billion people celebrate the Lunar New Year.
In Inside the Harbin Ice Festival, the Harbin Ice Festival lights up the night sky in Harbin, China for a few weeks each winter. Huge ice buildings are created and lit for tourists to visit before they melt in the spring. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Chinese New Year: The Biggest Celebration on Earth, a documentary series detailing the world's largest annual human migration (Chunyun), where over 1.5 billion people celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Happy holidays! With so many celebrations all over the globe during this season, it's the perfect time to teach your Grade 3–5 students about winter holidays around the world. Make copies of this mini-book (simply print on both sides flipped on the short edge, stack, and fold to assemble) for your students and invite them to read about each holiday and complete a simple report page full of questions, coloring, drawing, favorite facts, and more. Here are the eight winter holidays covered:
-
Diwali: A Hindu Festival of Lights celebrating the victory of light over darkness, with lamps, fireworks, and family gatherings.
-
St. Lucia Day: A Scandinavian holiday honoring St. Lucia, featuring processions with candles and special buns to bring light during the dark winter.
-
Las Posadas: A Mexican tradition reenacting Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter, celebrated with processions, songs, and parties.
-
Hanukkah: A Jewish holiday celebrating the miracle of the Temple’s menorah oil lasting eight days, marked with candles, dreidel games, and fried foods.
-
Winter Solstice: The shortest day and longest night of the year, celebrated by many cultures as the return of the sun with feasts and light-themed traditions.
-
Christmas: A Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus, often marked with gift-giving, decorations, and family gatherings.
-
Kwanzaa: A weeklong African American celebration honoring African heritage and the Seven Principles through candles, reflection, and community activities.
-
Lunar New Year: An Asian cultural holiday welcoming the new year on the lunar calendar, celebrated with family reunions, special foods, and traditions for good luck.
Think You’re a Winter Holidays Expert? Let’s Find Out!
Winter is a magical time of year, filled with lights, music, and celebrations around the world. There's so much to discover: Diwali’s glowing lamps, St. Lucia Day’s candlelit processions, the posadas of Mexico, Hanukkah’s spinning dreidels, Christmas trees, Kwanzaa candles, Lunar New Year’s red envelopes, and the winter solstice’s longest night.
But how much do you really know about these special winter holidays? This quiz is packed with fun facts, traditions, and a few surprises that only the most festive holiday experts will ace. Get ready to test your knowledge and see if you can shine bright like the season itself!
It’s story time... but you decide what happens. Cut out the story cards (Bluey caught in a web, a spider inching its way down, and more) and put them in any order you like. Make up an epic spooky story to go with the pictures. No matter what, it starts out once upon a time and ends with they lived happily ever after!
Bluey LOVES her new bedroom... but she misses Bingo too! So she’s writing a little midnight message to tell Bingo all about her new room. Circle the words to finish her note. For example, "My new bedroom is reeeeeally COOL or HAUNTED" and "I've moved in all my fave things, like TOYS or DUNNY PAPER." You decide!
It's Halloween (or Heelerween)! Grab your crayons and markers and finish this petrifying picture of costumed Bluey and Bingo as skeletons, witches, spiders, pumpkins, ghosts, and vampires.
Inspire by Season 1, Episode 8 "Fruit Bat": Not wanting to go to bed, Bluey tries to dream about being a nocturnal fruit bat so she can stay up all night long, and soon she finds herself flying through the night sky.
In How One Town Celebrates Spring With Snowdrops, people from the town of Shaftesbury celebrate the first signs of spring with a special festival. They planted over 500 snowdrop flower bulbs in a garden, helping these pretty white flowers bloom year after year. Kids also create big snowdrop lanterns, lighting up the night. The festival ends with a fun dance to wake up the "Green Man," a symbol of spring, and welcome the new season! This video is excerpted from BBC’s Countryfile, which explores rural life and traditions of the countryside.
In Sarah and Duck Trick-or-Treat, Sarah and her friends, Duck and Bug, dress up for Boo Night. Will their costumes scare people, earning them Boo Sweets? This video is excerpted from BBC’s Sarah & Duck, a kids' show about the adventures between 7-year-old Sarah and her quacky, flappy best friend, Duck.
Meet the extreme survivors. Penguins, giraffes, golden snub-nosed monkeys, Namaqua chameleons — these animals have evolved remarkable ways to endure some of the harshest conditions on Earth. We've put together a collection of BBC video clips all about extreme survivors (see Related Resources below). Watch them, then take the Kahoot to see what stuck.
The adaptations are wide-ranging: penguins withstand sub-zero temperatures, giraffes manage naturally high blood pressure, snub-nosed monkeys huddle together to survive freezing nights, and Namaqua chameleons shift skin color to beat the heat of the day. Explore how these animals have adapted, body and behavior, to survive against the odds.
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.
A total lunar eclipse happens when the Earth moves directly between the Sun and the Moon, blocking sunlight from reaching the Moon’s surface. During the eclipse, the Moon can appear dark red or copper-colored as sunlight bends through Earth’s atmosphere.
Even though the Moon travels around Earth about every 28 days, total lunar eclipses are rare. That’s because the Moon’s orbit is tilted slightly, so most months, the Moon passes a little above or below Earth’s shadow instead of through it. Only every six months or so are the Sun, Earth, and Moon lined up closely enough for a possible lunar eclipse.
Last September, millions of people around the world watched the rare event during organized watch parties and backyard gatherings. Astronomers encouraged people to bring blankets, snacks, and telescopes to enjoy the nighttime spectacle together. While cloudy skies blocked views in some places, observers across parts of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia were able to see the eclipse from beginning to end under clear skies.
In Throwing Fire for Chinese New Year, iron metal workers in Nanquan, China, create amazing, glowing art with molten metal. Today, they perform nightly, but the tradition goes back hundreds of years. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Chinese New Year: The Biggest Celebration on Earth, a documentary series detailing the world's largest annual human migration (Chunyun), where over 1.5 billion people celebrate the Lunar New Year.
In Inside the Harbin Ice Festival, the Harbin Ice Festival lights up the night sky in Harbin, China for a few weeks each winter. Huge ice buildings are created and lit for tourists to visit before they melt in the spring. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Chinese New Year: The Biggest Celebration on Earth, a documentary series detailing the world's largest annual human migration (Chunyun), where over 1.5 billion people celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Happy holidays! With so many celebrations all over the globe during this season, it's the perfect time to teach your Grade 3–5 students about winter holidays around the world. Make copies of this mini-book (simply print on both sides flipped on the short edge, stack, and fold to assemble) for your students and invite them to read about each holiday and complete a simple report page full of questions, coloring, drawing, favorite facts, and more. Here are the eight winter holidays covered:
-
Diwali: A Hindu Festival of Lights celebrating the victory of light over darkness, with lamps, fireworks, and family gatherings.
-
St. Lucia Day: A Scandinavian holiday honoring St. Lucia, featuring processions with candles and special buns to bring light during the dark winter.
-
Las Posadas: A Mexican tradition reenacting Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter, celebrated with processions, songs, and parties.
-
Hanukkah: A Jewish holiday celebrating the miracle of the Temple’s menorah oil lasting eight days, marked with candles, dreidel games, and fried foods.
-
Winter Solstice: The shortest day and longest night of the year, celebrated by many cultures as the return of the sun with feasts and light-themed traditions.
-
Christmas: A Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus, often marked with gift-giving, decorations, and family gatherings.
-
Kwanzaa: A weeklong African American celebration honoring African heritage and the Seven Principles through candles, reflection, and community activities.
-
Lunar New Year: An Asian cultural holiday welcoming the new year on the lunar calendar, celebrated with family reunions, special foods, and traditions for good luck.
Think You’re a Winter Holidays Expert? Let’s Find Out!
Winter is a magical time of year, filled with lights, music, and celebrations around the world. There's so much to discover: Diwali’s glowing lamps, St. Lucia Day’s candlelit processions, the posadas of Mexico, Hanukkah’s spinning dreidels, Christmas trees, Kwanzaa candles, Lunar New Year’s red envelopes, and the winter solstice’s longest night.
But how much do you really know about these special winter holidays? This quiz is packed with fun facts, traditions, and a few surprises that only the most festive holiday experts will ace. Get ready to test your knowledge and see if you can shine bright like the season itself!
It’s story time... but you decide what happens. Cut out the story cards (Bluey caught in a web, a spider inching its way down, and more) and put them in any order you like. Make up an epic spooky story to go with the pictures. No matter what, it starts out once upon a time and ends with they lived happily ever after!
Bluey LOVES her new bedroom... but she misses Bingo too! So she’s writing a little midnight message to tell Bingo all about her new room. Circle the words to finish her note. For example, "My new bedroom is reeeeeally COOL or HAUNTED" and "I've moved in all my fave things, like TOYS or DUNNY PAPER." You decide!
It's Halloween (or Heelerween)! Grab your crayons and markers and finish this petrifying picture of costumed Bluey and Bingo as skeletons, witches, spiders, pumpkins, ghosts, and vampires.
Inspire by Season 1, Episode 8 "Fruit Bat": Not wanting to go to bed, Bluey tries to dream about being a nocturnal fruit bat so she can stay up all night long, and soon she finds herself flying through the night sky.
In How One Town Celebrates Spring With Snowdrops, people from the town of Shaftesbury celebrate the first signs of spring with a special festival. They planted over 500 snowdrop flower bulbs in a garden, helping these pretty white flowers bloom year after year. Kids also create big snowdrop lanterns, lighting up the night. The festival ends with a fun dance to wake up the "Green Man," a symbol of spring, and welcome the new season! This video is excerpted from BBC’s Countryfile, which explores rural life and traditions of the countryside.
In Sarah and Duck Trick-or-Treat, Sarah and her friends, Duck and Bug, dress up for Boo Night. Will their costumes scare people, earning them Boo Sweets? This video is excerpted from BBC’s Sarah & Duck, a kids' show about the adventures between 7-year-old Sarah and her quacky, flappy best friend, Duck.