Video Clips

Video Clips for Math Class


I will be adding more as I find them and use them. Please send any video clips that you have found useful in your classroom.

The Number System

Colin Dodds - Number Types (Math Song): Nice review of the different number types and their definitions which includes:  Natural Numbers, Whole Numbers, Integers, Rational Numbers.

PEMDAS: I show this video of a traffic accident where a car runs a red light. After showing the video, I ask the students to write in their math journal about the accident. What caused the accident? Could it have been prevented? How? What does this video have to do with math? Then we discuss the importance of rules that everyone agrees on and follows in driving and math.

Triple O (Order of Operations):  Teacher turns a boring lesson on order of operations where students are falling asleep into a whole class review of the rules of order of operations by using some simple props and turning on the music.

PEMDAS Style - Order of Operations Gangnam Style Parody: Student writes and performs this video for her class. Her dancing is great!

Math Rocks! Flip It! Whip It! by Devo is the perfect song for reviewing the procedure for dividing fractions.

Nature by Numbers: Beautiful video to introduce the beauty of numbers and patterns.

ViHart: Doodling in Math: Spiral, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant [1 of 3]: My favorite part of this video is when ViHart uses graph paper to draw the golden spiral using the Fibonacci Sequence. I show the whole video and go back to this part and stop and start it several times and have the students draw it themselves. Then I have the students bring in pine cones and pineapples and we identify and count the spirals with glitter glue and colored tape.

Integer Song:  Here is a rendition of the classic math song teaching the rules for adding and subtracting integers sung to the tune of Row Row Row your Boat. I tweaked the lyrics of the third line to make them more mathematically accurate.
     Same signs add and keep
     Different signs subtract
     Keep the sign of which has more
     And then you'll be exact.

Mathematical Pi (Full Song): Great for Pi Day

Fractions Music Video: A fifth grade class performs this catchy song which covers the definition of fractions, reducing fractions and all operations with fractions. I used this video on the first day of reviewing fractions and my sixth graders have been singing lines from this song for months!

This is a nice introduction to percents Colin Dodd's Percentages. I like to pause the video during the Trivia Time part of the video and let them guess:
1)  What percent of water in the human body?
2) What percent of the earth covered in water?
3) What percent of water in a watermelon?
4) What percent of water in a jellyfish?

The Ratio and Fraction Song. This math music video is very well done and it does a great job making the connection between fractions, ratios, proportions, rates and unit rates.

Another great video from the Singing History Teachers and their students and PEMDAS. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally to the tune of "Call me Maybe!"

I love showing this video, World Record Dive, 318,25 m, when I introduce negative numbers on the number line. I wish it were higher resolution, but the music is so calming and the students watch very intently to see what happens. This leads into a nice discussion about what are the numbers that are on the line that he uses to measure his distance below sea level.

This video of cliff jumping is a great way to start a discussion about absolute value and the distance from zero. Before I show the video I ask the students "Why would you want to know the distance from zero?" Here is a video of Laso Schaller's world record jump from Cascata del Salto in Maggia, Switzerland. The height of the cliff is 58.8 meters and the pool below is 8 meters deep.

The Weird Number. A spooky story about different kinds of numbers. Introduction to rational numbers


Ratios and Proportions

After finishing the chapter on ratios, I used this clip World's Fastest Everything to introduce the concept of rates. After we watched the clip I asked students if they could remember the records and I wrote them on the board which led into discussion about the definition of a rate and the distinction between rates and unit rates.

King Gallon was a fun way to show my students how to remember the conversions between gallons, quarts, pints, cups, and fluid ounces.


Expressions and Equations

I show this clip from the Japanese game show Unbeatable Banzuke: SeeSaw 60 to introduce the idea doing the same thing on both sides when solving equations.

We're Going on a Bear Hunt (in Runescape):  I show this video to introduce the idea that solving equations involves doing inverse operations in reverse order. I also wrote a song called Going on an X Hunt. I give the students simple rhythm instruments and we sing it together. Someday I will make a video of the class singing it.

I use Dan Meyer's Graphing Stories to introduce the concept of numberless graphs and graphing functions.

Solve Me Maybe (WSHS Math Song): I love the way this school has created a tradition where students and teacher work together to create math videos.

The Weird Algebras: Algebraic Style [GANGNAM STYLE PARODY]: My students made this video and performed it in class. It was amazing--I wish I had a video of it. The video and performance was the result of a group project where students were asked to write and perform a song about solving equations.

Why Algebra? is a good place to start when you first introduce the idea of a variable to represent unknown numbers.

Starships Algebra Song Miss C has her whole class dancing to a song that gives a nice overview of some of the basics of Algebra.

Properties of Algebra: This video made by three students includes bloopers at the end


Geometry

Tik Tok Math Song : Reviews formulas  for finding the area of square, circle, rectangle, parallelogram, triangle, and trapezoid. I like the fact that the video uses b (base) and h (height) for finding the area of all the quadrilaterals.

Call Me Maybe-"Half It Baby" (Area of a Triangle): Nice review of the connection between the area of rectangles and area of triangles. This is great to show after a discovery lesson.

Geometry (Math Parody to Poker Face)

Area of a circle, how to get the formula: I love this video! It cuts the circle into smaller and smaller pieces to show that the area of a circle is simply base height where base is half of the circumference (pi x r) and the height is r.


Who can resist the Nonagon Song by They Might Be Giants to introduce polygons?

I like to use these three drawing videos to introduce 3-D geometry.  I think that by drawing the figures, students can more easily visualize the figure which is necessary for understanding and calculating surface area and volume: Stacking Cylinders in 3-DFlowers in a 3-D BoxTreasure Chest.

What is a Prism?:  I like the way that this video shows the slicing of a solid and how you get the same shape as the base no matter where you slice it.

What makes a Prism? This video shows clearly what a prism is (bases and cross sections are all the same) by RHYTHmetric

Slicing a Rectangular Prism to find Volume. I love to do this with play-doh and this is a nice video to introduce the idea of using slices to find volume of prisms.

Gangnam Style Math (Transformation Style): Nice overview of transformations.

Volume Song (Happy Parody)

Surface Area. I like the way that this video shows how you unfold a box to find the net and then the surface area of a rectangular prism. Then with bright colors you can see that there are three pairs of congruent rectangles showing how the formula for surface area is derived.


Statistics and Probability

Mean, Median and Mode Rap by Mr. C: Nice review of these vocabulary words.

Probability Dynamite (RHYTHmetric)


Algebra I

Emily sings the "Quadratic Formula":  Shows the power of music to help students learn and memorize.

Quadratic Formula:  Just the music--"Pop Goes the Weasel"-- and the words to the song displayed on the screen for a classroom sing along! I memorized the quadratic formula several times over the years and then immediately forgot it after a test. It wasn't until I was doing my student teaching and learned this song from my cooperating teacher that I learned it for good--never to be forgotten.

Pythagorean Theorem Water Demo: Not a proof, but a nice, concise, and easy to understand demonstration of what the Pythagorean Theorem means.

AWESOME ALGEBRA MUSIC VIDEO featuring y = mx + b. This is a fun video with a catchy tune and lots of repetition of slope intercept form of a linear equation.


Calculus

Poker Face - Math Version

Calculus Round the Clock (Math Parody to Tik Tok)


First Week of School: Growth Mind Set

Everything is Awesome

Baby Learning to Walk This video show a toddler learning to walk over a two month period and falling down numerous times with a fun soundtrack.

How the Brain Learns  This video explain hows the brain learns something new by using the analogy of building a rope bridge over a deep crevasse.

Motivation Video on Learning from Failure and not giving up Motivation video about learning and succeeding with effort and hard work and also learning from mistakes

Shake it off  Jo Boaler, the Stanford professor behind YouCubed.org works hard to dispel fixed mindsets about math. She recently shared a video from 2015 YouCubed summer camp in which her students show their enthusiasm for problem solving and their willingness to learn from their mistakes.

Try Everything The lyrics from Zootopia's theme song couldn't be more perfect for summarizing what I want students to be doing in math class:  "I'll keep on making those new mistakes.  I won't give up. No, I won't give in till I reach the end, and then I'll start again. No, I won't leave. I wanna try everything. I wanna try even though I could fail."
       
Miscellaneous

Baby Learning to Walk: I want to use this video in class to introduce the growth mindset vs. the fixed mindset described in  Mindset by Carol S. Dweck. "Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult task of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it's too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don't worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward" (Pg. 16). I want to use this video to encourage my students to work hard and never give up and not get discouraged by mistakes.

Taking Tests Song: (Tips for Test Success) by Heath  I showed this video to my students at the beginning of the week as we started to review for state testing. I encouraged the students to have a positive attitude about the tests and described it as an opportunity to prove how hard they had worked all year and how much they had learned.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire Math Question: Which of these square numbers also happens to be the sum of two smaller square numbers?


Math Movies

Flatland: the Movie: This animated movie is based on the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott. I have had the opportunity to introduce this marvelous math story to most of my students since I started teaching 8 years ago. Currently I teach sixth grade math and at the beginning of the year we cover squares, square roots, cubes, cube roots, exponents and dimensions. I love sharing this movie with my students which helps them see and understand the connection between numbers and geometry.

Flatland: the Film: This animated version is much longer and more closely follows the story written by Abbot with it politcal and social satire (some of which is not really approriate in the middle school classroom).


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