Susan Petroff
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education, through a grant to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is helping to fund a major new literacy initiative for young readers. The centerpiece of this initiative is Between the Lions, a music-, book-, and print-filled television series, which stars two lions who guard the entrance to a magical library. Between the Lions is produced by WGBH/Boston and Sirius Thinking, Ltd. The show will employ a state-of-the-art curriculum consisting of a mix of phonemic awareness and whole language skills an d is targeted to beginning readers aged four to seven. Many of the nation's leading experts on literacy--including Dr. Marilyn Adams, author of Beginning to Read; Dr. Jeanne Chall, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University; Dr. Robert Slavin, co-director of the Center for Research on Students Placed at-Risk; and Dr. Dorothy Strickland, Professor of Reading for the State of New Jersey--helped to design the curriculum, following a 3-day literacy "summit" held at WGBH. Once characters and segments have been fully designed and scripted, formative testing will be used to help determine their appeal and efficacy as teaching tools.
The half-hour television series, which will air daily on PBS beginning in the 1999-2000 broadcast season, will help launch a multiple-media "Virtual Classroom" that will grow to include basal readers, CD-Roms, trade books, teacher training tapes, videos for parents, web sites, and a nationwide "Read to Children!" campaign. Founding Partners for Between the Lions--many of whom will collaborate with the producers on series-related reading projects--include the American Library Association, Reading is Fundamental (RIF), and the Library of Congress, Center for the Book.
As research for Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Reading Rainbow has proven, children do learn from what they see on TV. High-quality, educational television has been shown to increase children's vocabulary, to result in more reading and increased library visitation, and to teach letters, numbers, and other key emergent-literacy skills. Between the Lions will pick up where series like Sesame Street leave off. By taking a systematic, comprehensive approach to showing young children how and why to read and write. Once the series is on the air, rigorous testing will help ascertain the series' success in teaching letter-sound correspondences, sight word recognition, and other decoding and comprehension strategies.
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