Chapter 3 Super Why!

Childrens Television teaches many concepts about early literacy. SUPER WHY! is a
breakthrough preschool series designed to help kids with the critical skills that they need to learn
to read as recommended by the National Reading Panel (alphabet skills, word families, spelling,
comprehension and vocabulary).
Watch an episode of Super Why! via their YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLESZtGRdEqQP0o8WzLbkVA/featured
1. You will need to provide the link and title to the episode you watched.
2. Share at least three concepts you saw in the episode taught related to this weeks text.
3. Provide the time stamp on the video where the concept is being taught.
4. Name the concept being taught from a description within your textbook with the page number
reference, and a description of the activity in the episode.
5. After completing your three concepts, share how you feel you may use public television to
teach reading in your classroom.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg0HIYmi3Sg
2a. At 5:50, the main character begins reading and invites the audience to read along. Because it
is for preschoolers, I doubt they are actually reading along, but rather following the track of the
words. I would count this as shared reading (Heilman, Blair, & Rupley, 2002, p. 78), similar to
a teacher reading a book aloud to a class.
2b. When the video reaches 9:04, one of the characters is writing the word, dress. She prompts
the audience to give her the letter that matches each sound, except for /e/, and then invites them
to draw the letter with her. This shows an attempt at creating an awareness of the phonemegrapheme relationship (Heilman, et al., 2002, p. 63). It helps the children understand that
written letters correspond with spoken sounds.
2c. At 14:26 in the video, they match the word that was made with the actual object and they
read it together, showing an example of paired reading (Heilman, et al., 2002, p. 78).
3. Using public television can give them the general plots to many well-known stories such as
fairy tales and folk tales. Both SuperWhy! and Wishbone did or do that. Shows like Reading
Rainbow can help to expose children to new books that may not be in the classroom and
encourage them to seek out new books on similar topics. Because of this, I may use public
television periodically in my classroom.