What it is: Life is is an incredible site from BBC Earth. The beautifully interactive site is full of images, video, and stories from BBC Earth’s most captivating documentaries. Each month features a different theme with September’s theme, Life is…Colorful. The astonishing images and video capture life’s most colorful displays in nature. The search page is equally stunning, offering an on-screen widget that lets students adjust the pictures in the grid by filtering by hot/cold, slow/fast, sea/sky, or color.
How to integrate Life Is from BBC Earth into your curriculum: Life is would make for an incredible discussion starter or creative writing prompt. This month’s theme is Life is Colorful. Ask students to come up with descriptive words for the pictures and images they are seeing. Students can use the descriptive words they came up with to write a Life is… poem. The poem could start with the line Life is… include descriptions of what they observed in the video and end with …Colorful.
Students can make their own Life is… type videos with a theme of their choosing using a tool like the National Geographic Wildlife Filmmaker.
This site can be used on classroom computers or in a lab setting, but I think it would be absolutely stunning on an interactive whiteboard or projector connected computer!
Tips: The left and right arrows on the site let you view each picture in the theme series separately. Each picture has an overlay with additional information about the image.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Life Is in your classroom!
The site is not available right now but it looks amazing from your review here. I’ve bookmarked it to make sure that I keep an eye out for when it’s back up.
I can’t wait to take Life is for a test run. It’s unavailable right now, but I’ve got it bookmarked! I especially like the monthly themes. I think it would be interesting to visit the site monthly and have a class discussion about why a certain theme was chosen and what it means.
Great idea Jessica!
What a shame! I hope that it is working for you again soon, it is a really neat site.