Resources
links

Healthy Kids Gang

Iowa Health System, in partnership with Iowa Public Television, has developed the Healthy Kids Gang Program. The program is built upon a series of educational and informational kits. Each kit focuses on a single topic like blended families, hand washing and self-esteem. Each contains educational materials for the caregiver and parents, and a week's worth of age-appropriate educational and fun activities for toddlers, preschoolers and kindergartners.

Parenting Counts: A Focus on Early Learning

Parenting Counts: A Focus on Early Learning, co-developed by Talaris and KCTS Seattle/Television, brings the research on best parenting practices into parent's daily lives through a series of television spots and workshops. The goals of the program are:

• stimulate greater awareness of early learning (birth to five years),
• promote more effective parenting and caregivers techniques, and
• enhance parent-child relationships.

Program materials from Parenting Counts: A Focus on Early Learning are incorporated into IPTV's RTL Family and Provider Book Club workshops.

PBS KIDS

PBS KIDS Online extends the mission of PBS KIDS TV programming by giving a diverse audience of children and their families the resources to improve school readiness skills, explore new subjects, express their thoughts, and play in a safe environment. PBS KIDS Online strives to be accessible to the largest possible audience by:

• offering content that is friendly to pre-readers and low-literacy users,
• addressing the needs of users with disabilities,
• developing activities including games, stories, music and coloring that visitors can enjoy using a wide
• variety of computer systems and Internet connections.

PBS KIDS Share A Story

The PBS KIDS Share A Story literacy campaign inspires adults to help children develop language and literacy skills through daily activities, including book reading, storytelling, drawing, rhyming and singing. The PBS KIDS Share a Story site provides adults with a chance to share their favorite story as well as a fun selection of story-related activities from PBS KIDS, reading resources from PBS Parents and PBS Teachers and news about upcoming PBS KIDS Share A Story events.

PBS Parents

This Web site helps parents and caregivers raise children who are ready to learn by offering educational activities and resources designed by experts in child development. The site includes PBS KIDS program information, an up-to-the minute PBS KIDS local TV schedule, tips for enjoying playtime together, thematic booklists, Q&A with guest experts, and articles for Spanish-speakers. The site also includes a robust search tool that helps parents to find activities that develop certain skills, such as math or reading.

PBS Teachers — Early Childhood Educators
PBS Teachers aggregates the PreK-12 educational services that PBS and its local stations provide and helps teachers incorporate video and the Web into the classroom. As part of the Ready To Learn service, the Early Childhood Educators area of PBS Teachers, provides additional resources for PreK-2 educators, including a monthly thematic unit of online activities, articles about issues in early childhood education, recommended books and links, and printables in Spanish and English for teachers to give to parents to help them reinforce the educational messages their children receive in the classroom. In addition, educators can search topical lists of lesson plans tied to our award-winning PBS KIDS programming and correlated to national and state standards.

Reading Rockets

A national multimedia project that looks at how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help. Reading Rockets includes:

• five-part PBS television series called Launching Young Readers,
• one-hour PBS documentary called A Tale of Two Schools, narrated by Morgan Freeman,
• comprehensive and daily-updated Web site at www.ReadingRockets.org,
• Web site for Spanish-speaking parents at www.ColorinColorado.org,
• national outreach campaign in partnership with top education associations,
• new mentoring project called First Year Teacher,
• teleconference series for teacher professional development,
• print guides for viewers, educators, and families.