Seeing inspirational and mind-blowing videos for kids

• What can I show children to inspire and wow them? I teach children aged between 9 and 11. I'm looking for video clips (or other) to show the children that will blow their minds - or at least, prompt discussion, broaden their horizons and take them outside of the confines of the four walls of the classroom. We focus so much on the academic side of things at school - so much reading, writing, maths, etc. Of course we cover the other subjects too, as well as the social and emotional side of learning. I want to sometimes, though, be able to show the children something possibly completely random and unrelated to what we might be studying at that point, that will make them think, make them laugh, make them smile or spark something in their brains. Basically something worthy and with learning value, but different from anything we might cover as part of our curriculum-based learning. I bookmark things as I come across them on the internet (clever infographics, videos, images), but would love to collect more ideas so that I have a bank of things to use when we have a spare ten minutes or so. It's difficult to give examples of what I'm after - and indeed, I'm not just after videos. Websites, texts, images, science experiments, games - I'm up for anything, although things that don't in themselves require a lot of time are preferable. Recently, for example, I came across a lovely gallery of pictures of 'amazing places' which the children found awe-inspiring. We plotted the locations on a world map, researched why a lake in one picture was pink, and generally enjoyed learning a bit more about the world around us. Another example would be Chris Hadfield's videos from space, which the children loved watching. Just yesterday we watched that video clip where a camera was attached to a bird, so you got a bird's eye view as it flew around, just because I thought they'd find it cool, and we had a spare three minutes. Thanks in advance!

• Answer:

  http://thekidshouldseethis.com usually has a good assortment of stuff. Some of it may be too young, too old, too whatever for your kids, but if you sift through you should find a lot of worthwhile stuff.