WordWorld: The Land of Early Reading

WTTW and PBS Kids have brought another fine educational show to the air. WordWorld is a computer-animated television series, which promotes literacy for small children who are just beginning to develop reading skills.

WordWorld is an innovative series, because it presents words in an entirely new way. Most shows for early readers present words on the screen next to puppets, cartoon characters, costumed people, etc. This approach is okay, but the on-screen characters tend to distract children. Most children will tend to focus on the talking characters and pay little attention to the words on the screen. The problem is that, children will not even look at the screen unless there is something entertaining to see. The reality is that the characters have to be present to hold the children’s interest.

WordWorld offers a creative solution to this dilemma. In WordWorld, the animated characters, WordFriends, are made of words. For example, the letters D, O, and G form the dog’s body, and the letters P, I, and G form the pig’s body. Going a step further, WordWorld is filled with WordThings. WordThings are objects made from letters. For example, the letters B, A, R, and N form a barn. This is a wonderful approach, because the show can hold the interest of children with characters while simultaneously getting children to look directly at words. Since the characters are made out of words, the children wind up focusing on actual words, which just so happen to form the named objects.

WordWorld is true to its name. WordWorld is a world composed of words and a wonder place for children to begin learning about words. The imaginative producers of this brilliant show should be commended for how they have permanently raised the bar for educational television.

Sesame Street Is the Fast Lane of Education

Sesame Street is the single most important show on television. Seasame Street first aired on November 10, 1969. Over the decades, the producers of the show have fine-tuned the process of education through entertainment and have made Sesame Street the standard in children’s educational entertainment.

The key to Sesame Street’s effectiveness is the show’s energetic format. Sesame Street takes the essence of early learning (colors, shapes, numbers, letters, etc.) and integrates them into fun, interesting, and quick segments. For example, Big Bird and Ernie may discuss the letter D, and then Ernie will flashback to a song he sang to Bert about the letter D. Elmo may tell Cookie Monster that his favorite number is 5, and then a quick music video about the number 5 will play. Many of these segments last just a few minutes (often less than a minute); however, the producers have managed to weave the segments together to create one seamless episode after another.

Parents who watch Sesame Street with their children on a regular basis will recognize many of the songs and skits that appear throughout almost every episode. Sesame Street has amassed such a tremendous library of material that the producers can pull from dozens of classic segments for almost any subject. Even though some of these segments go back decades, they still manage to be relevant. The reason why they are relevant is because the basics of learning have not changed, and young children today are a lot like young children were decades ago.

In the world of media, there are hundreds of examples of important programming; however, not one of them does as much to introduce small children to learning as Sesame Street. There is no more valuable hour of programming on television.