Cramming in some knowledge with Netflix – ready for school #StreamTeam

It’s taken four years but the day is nearly here. D is really, really excited about starting school tomorrow – and although she’s only just turned four, she’s definitely ready for it. Along with Seb she sucks up knowledge and delights in asking questions and making sense of what she’s learned.

But I must admit, quite a lot of their her knowledge (and Seb’s too) is recently coming from an unexpected source: The Magic School Bus

It’s aimed at helping kids understand science in an interesting way, and it obviously works because fairly regularly we’ve been getting comments and observations about things that have been covered as part of the latest episodes they’ve watched. It actually goes into quite a lot of detail about the way things work and I have to admit I often get drawn in myself – particularly when Miss Frizzle is wearing one of her very interesting topic-related dress concoctions!

Animal Mechanicals is also featuring heavily on our TV this month, which – although it doesn’t have such blatantly education related content – does seem to get over quite well the benefits of co-operative working. Plus it has a unicorn, so of course it’s an instant winner for D.

And talking of unicorns, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, complete with unicorns, pegasuses and earth ponies, is the third big love – and something that all three kids can stay happily glued to for hours (if we’d let them). Apparently the politics of Ponyville are far more complex than you might think – certainly we’ve had quite a few very detailed discussions about the finer points of pony life lately. And most bizarrely, it turns out that the kids Uncle Star is a ‘bronie’ (apparently, the name for an older male fan of the prancing pony friends) and he can happily sit there and debate along with them, armed with his fairly encyclopaedic knowledge of the goings on!

There has been so much pony love that D demanded her whole birthday party was themed around it…

Finally, we’ve been watching a bit of DINOTRUX, which is all about (as you might guess from the name) hybrid dinosaur trucks. But not all the Dinotrux are ‘friendly ones’ – a situation that D gets quite concerned about. Luckily the lead Dinotrux and his Reptool friend are pretty good at fending off the evil Tyrannosaurus Trux, D-Structs. Having watched the first episode curled up next to me for a bit of support, seeing everything turned out all right meant that we were cleared for watching more without any problems. Handily, one of the topics for D’s first year of school is dinosaurs – so we’ve had a bit of a headstart on that talking about the different types of dinosaur and their characteristics.

AND they look good on our holiday hats!