Friday, December 19, 2008

New PBS Kids Programming

We don't have cable, so the only thing my kids really watch on TV is PBS Kids programming. Knuckles especially loves shows like Word World, where all the objects are made out of the letters that form their name.

My older kids pointed out that strangely enough, all the animals in this program talk, except for the dog. Why not the dog? What did the dog to do deserve this kind of treatment?

They have several reading programs including Princess' favorite "Word Girl" (vocabulary building), a math program (Cyber Chase) that has it's "Lookit me ma, I'm aligned with the NCTM Standards" moments but is otherwise good, and now a science program called "Sid The Science Kid." But they don't have any programs about punctuation. So I propose that they create one.

We can call it "Punctuation Pals" or something similar, and the characters can be lovable anthropomorphic punctuation marks with adorable names. Questy the Question Mark can speak only in questions to his friends Yowza the Exclamation Point, Semy the Semicolon, Red the Comma, Menstree the Period and Sigmoid the Colon. Together they can give a trophy to the Apostrophe for his proper use, fight the evil fraternal twins Sentence Fragment and Run-On, and generally exemplify the cooperative problem solving characteristic of every PBS Kids show.