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My mother claims I sat in front of the TV utterly hypnotized by the "phonetics shadows," and that it's how I learned to read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfQseUDQB2o

Is there anything like this available for kids now? It's so stripped down and catchy that, even as an adult, I could watch these all day long.



I bought the DVDs when they came out, about 10 years ago. Look for "The Best of the Electric Company." It was, and remains, totally brilliant. My two elder children loved it, and couldn't get enough. My son (who is now 10) never got into it, but I'll somehow forgive him.

Really and truly, the Electric Company was a very, very clever show that mixed humor and education in a unique way.

The company that produced these DVDs never imagined that children would be watching; they imagined it was only nostalgic adults. So the "best of" DVDs, when first produced, included condom ads! After enough parents protested that this wasn't the most appropriate kind of advertising to put on a children's DVD, the company issued new ones with more child-friendly advertising.


I give a lot of credit to "The Electric Company" as well. Because the episodes were repeated so much, some of these memes still stick with me today, including "You Drive Me Up the Wall" which packed humor, double-meaning of phrases, idiom, and reading into one little skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eNoTF_hNY


There's AlphaBlocks from the BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/alphablocks

That's a more rigid synthetic phonics approach (although some people claim they're saying the sounds wrong) and it's short (5 minutes?) animated stories rather than the more abstract thing you linked to. I'm English, I've never seen that before, it looks good and I wish there was more like it around at the moment. There is way too much really bad children's tv with a tiny smear of "education" sprinkled on top.


Alphablocks and Numberjacks are both great IMO; I think the kids like(d) it too.

The last couple of years of Christmas lectures have been really good family viewing (for our family!), as were the RSC lecture series last year.




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