I wanted to make a quick shout out to my favorite 'new' kids television show.  As with every parent of a toddler you go through a phase where you get inundated with kids shows.  Some like Teletubbies or Barnery are pure torture (My son doesn't watch these shows).  Others like the new Mickey Mouse club are instantly appealing and for an adult at least watchable (the first 3 or 4 times for a given estimate, after that your brain still turns to mush).  Of course in posting this I'm admitting that my son (age 2) watches TV - which is of course the root of all evil according to some.

However, this post is focused on my favorite of today's current array of morning kids programming.  In the preceding paragraph I mentioned shows that are rather old, and I don't want compare say Barney to 1970's era Captain Kangaroo.  Different eras have different shows.  The first thing I learned about modern pre-school kids TV in the morning is that there are two definite leaders - Disney and PBS Kids.  I know several of you probably think I've missed both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.  I didn't you see Disney and PBS both follow a minimal advertising model for the morning stretch.  Admitedly PBS keeps that model 24hours a day but to me the fact that Disney has matched this model from 6AM through Noon is impressive.

In general Disney has a better set of shows when it comes to the combination of entertainment and education.  By this I mean that when I consider the shows my son pays reasonable amount of attention to the Disney shows keep his attention while several of the PBS shows while potentially more educational are met with 'no- no' meaning - take me back to Disney.  After all one of his favorite shows is the Mickey Mouse show and Mickey's appeal is great and the show includes things like counting, shapes and colors.

That's great however last fall Disney and PBS Kids each 'introduced' from my standpoint a new show.  On Disney the new show was Bunny Town.  It was preceded by weeks of over-promotion telling us how great it would be. As usual the overwhelming hype was indicative of just how weak the show was.  On the other side although to the best of my knowledge there wasn't overwhelming publicity, but PBS Kids introduced a show - the only show which we can switch to even against a showing of Mickey.

By now if you recognize the title of this post you know that show is Word World.  This is an awesome show, they introduce the idea of building words from letters.  The computer graphics not only create characters but literally use the letters to create the object they describe.  For example the Dog character is an adaptation of the letters Dog with legs, ears, tail etc. added.  The letters don't just disappear or appear they are used to create objects and the graphics are of the type you could only create in the past couple years. 

I have no doubt but that watching this show feeds into the fact that my son knows all of his captial letters (note reading books and playing with letters in the tub and talking about them elsewhere - including license plates - also plays a big role , not to mention that my son is surprisingly bright.) At any rate, the show is well produced and you can check out their site including a sample episode at: http://www.wordworld.com/

To view the show's opening scene head over to PBSKids.org (http://pbskids.org/wordworld/video/montage.html?load=montage1) or to get a feel for how the characters behave check out the embeded video below - although it omits the rich animated scenery and just focuses on the characters and building words.