Review of How Super WHY Can Teach Kids to Read
Preschool PBS Kids TV Show Develops Literacy Skills
May 31, 2009
Even parents dubious about letting children watch too much television can rest at ease about allowing their preschoolers to watch the PBS Kids® tv show Super WHY! Two recent studies have confirmed that this educational kids' tv program for children ages 3 to 6 can boost early literacy skills and improve a child's ability to learn to read.
How Can Super WHY Teach Kids to Read?
To teach kids to read, Super WHY! first engages their interest and encourages them to interact with the onscreen action. The characters in Super WHY! appeal to preschoolers on two levels. Because they can transform into the Super Readers, they feed into children's interest in super heroes and inspire young viewers to create their own "Super You" identities. At the same time, although the characters live in magical Storybrook Village, at heart Whyatt, Princess Pea, Littlest Pig, and Red Riding Hood are normal kids with ordinary personalities and problems to which a preschool audience can relate.
Once it has captured its preschool audience's attention and gotten children to start assisting the Super Readers to overcome the obstacles they encounter during their adventures inside different stories, Super WHY! teaches and reinforces the key reading skills determined by the National Reading Panel Report as being the most important for beginning readers to master.
- Alpha Pig's Alphabet Power teaches alphabet recognition, helping children memorize the alphabet in sequence and identify different letters.
- Wonder Red's Word Power teaches word decoding, word families, and rhyming, all of which develop a child's phonological awareness and phonemic awareness by giving him or her practice with breaking apart and sounding out words and noticing identical word endings.
- Princess Presto's Spelling Power teaches more complicated letter sounds (such as consonant digraphs like sh and ch), how to put letters together to make words, and handwriting skills such as the correct way to move a pencil (or magic spelling wand!) to form each letter correctly.
- Super Why's Power to Read teaches kids how to use all of these phonics skills together to read words in a sentence, adding the element of reading comprehension and understanding which words belong in a sentence and which do not make sense in context.
Research Studies on How Super WHY! Improves Preschool Reading Skills
A recent study by the Director of the Annenberg Children's Media Lab confirmed that the children in the study did learn the content being taught by the Super WHY! episodes they viewed. When compared to a control group that watched episodes of a science program instead, the preschoolers who watched Super WHY! demonstrated:
- Better overall levels of early reading achievement.
- High levels of engagement with the characters and the show.
- Great gains in mastering the target literacy skills (measured by comparing pretest and posttest results).
- Dramatically improved reading skills.
Best of all, the study showed that kids from lower income families, who often do not have the support needed to master reading at an early age, showed enormous growth in reading abilities after watching this educational kids' tv program.
A second study conducted by the Florida State University's Center for Reading Research observed preschoolers across the United States who attended Super WHY! reading camps. Campers took part in organized activities each day by acting as different Super WHY! characters and practicing the special reading skills of each character in turn. Analysis of the pretests and posttests that the children took showed that the kids demonstrated an improvement in the particular literacy skills presented by the program's curriculum (targeted for children from low-income families), as well as an 84% gain in phonics skills and a 139% gain in word recognition skills.
How Parents Can Use Super WHY! to Help Kids Read
Watching Super WHY! by itself is undoubtedly beneficial. However, parents can capitalize on those benefits even more by becoming personally involved with helping children practice the skills introduced by the show and continue the learning long after the television is turned off.
By watching the show with kids, parents can observe how the show breaks reading skills down and presents them to kids in natural, everyday situations. Mothers and fathers can then use the same tactics to help children practice phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics skills, word recognition, and reading comprehension as kids encounter various words throughout their own day-to-day lives.
Kids TV Program Teaches Prereading Skills
If families are truly resistant to incorporating television shows into their children's lives, then there is no need to force kids to watch this charming PBS KIDS® preschool series. If parents are looking for enriching kids' tv shows that teach preschool reading skills, however, they can add Super WHY! to their daily viewing schedules with a clear conscience.
References
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (May 6, 2009) Research Proves Super WHY! Helps Children Learn to Read. Press release. Retrieved on 2009-05-15.
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