Youtube Channels I Use for Homeschooling

These are the Youtube channels I use regularly with the preschool-age girls that I homeschool. I don't prefer to include a lot of screen time in our daily school tasks, but the fact is that videos, songs, and computer screens garner a lot of excitement and attention, and I've found these channels to be very useful in reinforcing the concepts I teach. We typically watch 3 or 4 videos a day from a variety of these channels, cycling between new songs/concepts and reviewing old ones.

1. Teacher Tipster

This channel is definitely more designed to give teachers rhymes and strategies for teaching, but the 4-year-olds think he's utterly hilarious and love watching his videos. We use his clock rule and the 3D shapes rhymes consistently.

2. Music Express Magazine

My girls love music and dancing. This channel provides a number of fun, kid-friendly choreographed routines for kids to learn and practice. It's good to get a little coordination practice in and sometimes the little ones have a lot of energy--a dance video can help burn some of it off in an approved manner.

3. The Learning Station

-Nursery Rhymes and songs to memorize information. We've used "Seven Days in a Week" and "12 Months in a Year" with great success.

4. All Things Animal TV

-I'm actually not a huge fan of this one, as the animated aliens, in my opinion, add nothing to the show, but it's the best consistent channel I've found thus far to help the preschoolers really get a feel for what different animals look like in real life versus in cartoon form, without it being too in-depth or above their heads. I wish they had something more like Zooboomafoo or Kratt's Creatures available here! The closest zoo to us is several hours away, and the girls always respond really well to the chance to see animals that they've never seen in real life in action on the computer screen--seeing penguins or polar bears after reading about them in the book is really exciting!

5. Have Fun Teaching

So far, I've primarily used the individual letter songs (i.e. this week we're doing the Letter U Song). They are very repetitive, which is exactly what you need in preschool.

6. Didi and Friends

Songs in Bahasa Malaysia. Since our preschoolers need to gain some familiarity with the language of Bahasa, I frequently have them listen and sing along with these videos. Most of them are Bahasa versions of classic songs that I learned as "The Wheels on the Bus" or "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" as a kid.

7. Little Pim

These videos are aimed at really little kids for language learning--somewhat reminiscent of the Rosetta Stone method of teaching a language through images rather than translations. Fun! We have used the Mandarin videos.

8. Growing Up With Chinese

This series is aimed at somewhat older-than-preschool students, but is still kid-appropriate, and is my favorite of the kid-friendly Chinese resources I've found online. It starts from a fairly basic, beginner level, but by the 100th episode, it's advanced enough to challenge my level of Mandarin comprehension, which is pretty cool. I linked to the site where you can find all videos in the series, but many episodes are also on Youtube, if you prefer. I used to use this channel for my own Mandarin practice, and have plans to use it as I work on giving the little girls and my nine-year-old sister more of a solid foundation in Mandarin. We're taking a slight pause on Mandarin language learning until the girls are a little better at writing/reading letters, just because of the possible confusion that could be caused by the vastly different writing system.

9. Seven in All

Yep, I let them watch videos from our channel, too. Because they request it every day. They love watching "Akka" (Rebekah) doing crazy things in the videos and they're basically our biggest fans. Not to mention, Shiloh starred in one of the videos and who wouldn't want to watch themselves on Youtube?