Media Response 3 - Super Why!

Super Why! Why? Well, because the subject is alphabet and reading. Granted, this site is not one that our secondary education students or college age students would ever find themselves going to, but this site also has a great deal to offer in its structure, as does the television show which it is drawing from.

http://pbskids.org/superwhy/

I spent the morning last weekend watching this show and then following the show onto the website. The show is an interesting forum for learning. Amongst all the “educational” television that the FCC has mandated television stations show for their children’s television, this one is particularly of interest to me. I watched other things like Curious George, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Sid the Science Kid (wow he’s spastic), but I was impressed by one thing in particular in Super Why!

Here is the premise: Wyatt (aka Super Why) is a “regular” kid who can go into Storybook Village and meets with his friends (the Super Readers), characters generally drawn from fairytales: Princess Pea (aka Princess Presto), Little Red Riding Hood (aka Wonder Red), and Pig (aka Alpha Pig; I assume he’s one of the Three Little Pigs). They all have different “literacy” powers: to read, to spell, words and the alphabet. Pretty cheesy to us adults, but I have now watched toddlers eat it up.

What happens in every episode is a minor altercation in Storybook Village: someone won’t share, someone hurt someone else’s feelings, or a character won’t listen to another character when they rudely knock down their building blocks. The Super Readers “transform” after they “state their problem” – they have a question to answer. To answer the question, they go into a book to find the answer to that question. After a series of events that specifically engages skills such as knowing your alphabet or rhyming words, the most impressive part of the show occurs: they change the story they are in to develop a new story in an effort to change the outcome of the previous problem outside of the story.

Of note, this television show follows those four aspects of pedagogy we have earlier described in class. My favorite part is that transforming knowledge at the end. Doing the same thing in our classroom, as discussed in class, is a very difficult and time consuming thing, but I would recommend watching this show to see how it plays out in its simplicity – and maybe use in our classroom won’t seem as daunting.