I am looking for documentaries for my DS who is 6 years old to watch for the summer. He has had very little TV exposure and has not watched many documentaries and I think that I should remedy it this summer. Any interesting ones that you can recommend? He likes science, wildlife, nature and astronomy so far.

My DD 6 really liked the BBC Planet Earth series. She also liked the Discovery series North America. NOVA also has a lot of great documentaries, many that you can watch online.

The new Cosmos series!

I second Planet Earth and Nova!

Stephen Hawking's Into the Universe and The Grand Design
The How Things Work series
Marty Stouffers Wild America and there was a series he did with his child that I cannot recall.

Have fun!

I second Cosmos. Also if you can get Water Brothers, probably online and Brain Games. Maybe online too or NatGeo.

Bang goes the Theory is good too. 7 seasons of shows, but that might have to be online too. They are out of Britain.

The old Cosmos series! ;-)

We don't watch cable except for the sports occasionally but we do have a Roku and a Netflix account together with a Amazon account.

It is tremendous because there are hundreds of documentaries there and ALL of them are commercial free!

I particularly recommend the Pluto one by Neil Degrasse-Tyson and there are a host others there too - just follow your nose.

My joy would be complete if the full Smithsonian Channel were available via Roku too but alas it is not.

The 3-part National Geographic Guns, Germs and Steel series. It dumbs Jared Diamond's book down to the point that my 9 year old easily followed it. It's a great introduction to world history and has enough recreated battle scenes to hold a kid's interest.

We really enjoyed March of the Penguins, although DD5 was sort of traumatized when some of the baby penguins died, so watch out for that.

I liked SuperBridge (a 2 part Nova where they build a bridge across the Mississippi).

BBC has a history of chemistry documentary that we found really engaging, Chemistry: A Volatile History

The series How It's Made always catches DS' interest and is good for bite size watching (~3 segments per half hour)

Brain Games and How it's Made are great for this age group.

Connections is also great. And Neil Degrasse Tyson has an earlier physics series (not nearly as polished as Cosmos, but really interesting) that's streaming on Netflix... but I can't remember the name off hand.

Thanks for all the suggestions! We have Amazon and Roku and with an excellent library system at our disposal, a lot of these will be on our summer list. As usual, a treasure trove of material for me
PS: Thanks for the warning to preview stuff- we have an over emotional and sensitive type of kid here and I need to remember to do it.

David Macauley made videos of several of his books (Castle, Cathedral, and a few others) that my kids have enjoyed.

Jen