Electric Company Develops Early Literacy Skills
TV Show Teaching Phonemic Awareness, Phonological Awareness, Phonics
Aug 17, 2009
The PBS Kids Go educational tv show The Electric Company is designed to help struggling readers ages 6 to 9 who have outgrown Sesame Street and find its content and form babyish, yet who still need help mastering basic reading skills.
If such beginning readers have not yet developed even the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes and other units of speech, they will need to be taught phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and finally phonics skills before being able to move on to successful decoding of words. Therefore, the new The Electric Company 2009 shows cover both early literacy skills also taught by Sesame Street (such as identifying different sounds) and more advanced reading skills like understanding connected text.
Teaching Phonemic Awareness and Phonological Awareness
Before children can begin to read words, they must be able to identify, segment, and blend phonemes, or the smallest units of sound that make up different words. When kids segment phonemes, they isolate the individual sounds that make up a word. When kids blend phonemes, they put individual sounds together to make a word.
Once children have mastered phonemic awareness, they can distinguish between and work with single phonemes. Once they have mastered phonological awareness, they can identify, segment, and blend larger blocks of sound such as onsets (the beginning part or sound of a word, like /str/ in string) and rimes (the ending part or sound of a word, like /ing/ in string).
Both phonemic awareness and phonological awareness deal only with the sounds of spoken words, not with how words look when written as text with letters. Children must learn phonics skills to master how to connect the sounds they hear in spoken words with the letters used in written text.
Phonemic Awareness Instruction and Phonological Awareness
To help struggling readers at the earliest levels of reading ability, The Electric Company includes content to teach phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics skills. Much like an episode of Sesame Street will focus on certain letters and numbers, episodes of the new Electric Company follow a curriculum based on research and national educational standards and focus on teaching children specific early reading skills such as distinguishing between different consonant sounds (like hard c and soft c) or understanding how the addition of a letter like r or silent e changes other vowel sounds in a word.
Each episode of this educational kids tv program builds upon knowledge introduced in previous episodes, often repeating the same segment across different shows to reinforce the material being taught. The main narrative of each show is broken up by three "curriculum commercial breaks" made up of short segments such as songs, skits, and animated cartoons. Each break teaches explicitly the educational goals that were merely touched upon in the main narrative, using different strategies to present the same information in a variety of ways to reinforce the material and to appeal to a range of learning styles.
Children who are just learning to identify different phonemes will benefit from listening to the way characters sing and repeat sounds over and over while naming them, as in a song about the two ways to say c. Children who are ready to start blending phonemes will benefit from segments such as the classic skit (used in both the original The Electric Company and the new version) where two faces in silhouette state an onset and a rime and then blend the sounds together aloud to make a word.
How The Electric Company Can Teach Phonics Skills
At all times, children who are ready to start learning phonics skills can pay attention to the words and groups of letters displayed on their television screens. The letters that make up the target sounds flash different colors to highlight their connection to the sounds young viewers are hearing. Additionally, the literacy superpower of Jessica (one of the four main characters) is aural recall, or being able to turn all the spoken words she hears into written text, which also emphasizes sound-letter correspondence.
Once kids begin to understand how different sounds and letters correspond, they will be able to follow what is going on during skits such as Shock segments, where Shock demonstrates "phonetic strategies" by building and breaking apart words in character as a butcher, a karate master, or a spy. Seeing how adding, removing, and exchanging letters creates different words will help kids begin to understand both how words are formed and how they themselves can decode unknown words they encounter when reading new text.
Early Literacy Skills and Teaching Kids to Read
Since the first few steps on the road to literacy are being able to identify and manipulate different spoken sounds and understanding sound-letter correspondences, the PBS Kids Go educational tv show The Electric Company teaches children early literacy skills like phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics skills to prepare them to master more complicated decoding skills next.
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