Reach Every Reader: FableVision and Harvard Collaborate on Early Learning Literacy Apps

It’s never too early for children to start developing their literacy skills! Turn everyday routines into learning opportunities with Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE)’s Reach Every Reader, a foundation literacy initiative comprising resources, assessment, intervention, and support to help all children become successful readers and learners. FableVision developed two apps—Photo Play and Animal Antics—to transform car rides, trips to the grocery store, and more into moments of engaging conversation. 

Created in partnership with the HGSE, Reach Every Reader is an initiative that aims to support high-level, equitable literacy achievement by creating opportunities for conversation between parents, caregivers, and children. Five years in the making, the project seeks to bridge the literacy gap by improving learning opportunities and word acquisition in low-income families. 

Photo Play gives young children and caregivers the opportunity to decorate and interact with their own photos using fun stickers, emojis, and “talk” balloons. The app uses conversation prompts to encourage free-flowing conversation, both while using the app and offline. By allowing players to personalize photos of themselves, children are more engaged in the activities and more open to discussions of the location of the picture, memories of the day the photos were taken, and hopes for future trips and activities.

In Animal Antics, imaginations run wild as children and caregivers play make-believe and create stories and dialogue for animals cast in 20 different scenarios. The app incorporates play-acting and conversation exercises, allowing children and caregivers to take on the role of animal characters and move through scenarios of their choosing. As players move through each scenario, they take turns recording their voices and choosing the emotion of their animal, shaping and building the story as they go.

Thorough research was conducted to create apps that not only fulfilled specific learning goals, but also kept children engaged and excited. Playtesting was conducted with a diverse group of families who reported learning easily implementable, effective new strategies as a result of the initiative. Research emphasizing the quality and diversity of words was also incorporated into the development of each app, as was research on the importance of intergenerational play in children’s early language development. 

FableVision is proud to join forces with Reach Every Reader to launch this project supporting early literacy development through early assessment, detection, and intervention for children across a range of socioeconomic status. The initiative furthers our mission to move the world to a better place through positive media that helps bridge learning gaps for children of different backgrounds and abilities.

Photo Play, Animal Antics, and a GBH-created app Small Wonders are available now on iOS, Google, and Android. Click here to play now!

Some of Our Favorite Resources in the Age of Social Distancing

As many of us prepare for another few weeks of social distancing, FableVision staffers have filled our time with walks, cooking, dancing, crafting, and, of course, storytelling. Looking for some suggestions for activities you and your family can do together? We’ve gathered another list of some of our favorite resources for while we’re physically apart. 

For a list of Distance Learning resources (although there are some resources on this list that fit that bill as well), check out our other blog here.

Stay safe!

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Yards for Yeardley: a virtual MOVEment from One Love Foundation

Feeling restless? Move for a good cause! Yards for Yeardley is a virtual movement organized by One Love, a foundation dedicated to educating young people about healthy relationships. In honor of the 10th anniversary of Yeardley Love’s death, One Love invites you to walk, run, dance, or get even more creative about how you want to move in order to help create a world where we know how to love better. Register online to pledge the number of yards you’ll move by May 3!

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Go Wild! With Ranger Rick from National Wildlife Federation - available for free for a limited time!

Get a taste of the outdoors while you’re cooped up inside! Learn all about animals and wildlife in Go Wild! With Ranger Rick, a FableVision-developed app from the National Wildlife Federation. Answer trivia questions, play games, and hear some jokes while hanging out with your favorite raccoon buddy Ranger Rick.

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Sesame Workshop’s Caring for Each Other Resources

In times like these, it’s important to keep caring for one another. Sesame Workshop’s Caring For Each Other initiative provides numerous resources for parents and children to cope with stress and continue playing, laughing, and learning together—with help from some familiar friends on Sesame Street!

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WGBH’s Distance Learning Center

With so many incredible learning resources out there, it can be overwhelming to find ones that work best for you or your child. WGBH’s Distance Learning Center has gathered a collection of free, quality digital resources from PBS LearningMedia and other PBS programming that can easily be filtered by grade level and subject. 

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Hold a concert in your living room with BSO at Home

Putting together a soundtrack for your new stay-at-home routine? Look no further than the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s free collection of daily performances and behind-the-scenes videos. With new music every morning, BSO at Home will keep you tapping along to the beat with their live performances, backstage views of what it’s like to be in the orchestra, and inside looks into how orchestra members are spending their time at home.

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GoNoodle: mindful movement for homes and classrooms (and current at-home classrooms)

Turn screen time into active screen time with GoNoodle! GoNoodle’s free videos and games—made with input from child development experts—promote movement and mindfulness in kids, from dance parties to yoga sessions. 

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Listen to a podcast, story, or song from Pinna

You don’t need a daily commute to keep listening to quality content! Pinna provides audiobooks and podcasts of all genres for kids 3-12. Pinna is extending its free trial period to 60 days. Use promo code PINNA4KIDS to receive your 30 extra days of listening.

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The Family Dinner Project offers food, fun, and conversation

We’re not the only ones #stressbaking right now. Food is a great way to bring people together, and it’s now more important than ever to spend time at the dinner table with your family. Check out The Family Dinner Project’s FableVision-designed website for great recipes, family activities, and conversation starters! They also compiled their own stuck-at-home guide, which you can find here. And if you’re on a dessert-making spree, why not try this recipe for banana chocolate chip mug cakes or host your own virtual dinner party for family and friends?

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Rock out with Fender

Do you dream of being a rockstar? A pop star? Or do you just have a guitar lying around? Fender is offering three months of free guitar, bass, and ukulele lessons online. Learn how to play your favorite songs at your own pace with Fender Play’s video lessons.

July FableFriday: Julie Dobrow, Professor at Eliot- Pearson Children's School at Tufts University

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Julie Dobrow, Senior Lecturer in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and Tisch College Senior Fellow for Media and Civic Engagement at Tufts University. As an experienced scholar of child development and children’s media, Julie offers an experienced and unique perspective on creativity, imagination, and reconnecting with your inner child for those interested in entering the children’s media field.

“You need to be willing to keep learning, because the field and the platforms are always changing. I also think that the best producers of children’s media are the people who can connect with their inner child,” says Julie. “You need to remember what it FELT like to sit under that hedge and imagine that it was the portal to a whole different world. You need to close your eyes and SEE all kinds of fantastical things. You need to HEAR joyful music. And you need to DREAM in color, not black and white.”

As an attentive and supportive educator, Julie has even led many of her students to our studio for internships, and a few of them even staying as FableVision staff! A longtime FableVision friend, Julie talked with us about her history with children’s media, her latest projects, and her best advice for up-and-coming children’s media professionals.

You are part of the Eliot Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, the oldest Child Studies program in the nation. What is your role there and what do you enjoy most about it?
Ever since I’ve been at Tufts—and I’ve been at Tufts a LONG time, since 1995!—I’ve taught at Eliot-Pearson. At first, it was just one class on children and mass media. Since then, however, I’ve added a graduate seminar on the topic and introduced a new course a couple of years ago on creating children’s media. I have always loved teaching, but teaching in this area of study, which changes every year (if not every week!) is both challenging and fun because it means I have to keep learning too.

What first made you realize you were interested in children’s media, and how did you get your start?
I actually wrote my Master’s thesis on images of gender and race in children’s animated television. Then, I didn’t do anything with the topic for a while. But when I became a mom, I started renewing my interest because I saw in my own little home laboratory just how much and in how many different ways media impacted kids’ lives. That led me to explore the area more in my teaching, research, and writing.

Can you tell us some more about the Children’s TV Project (CTV)? How did the idea for this project come about and what reflections do you have as you near the end of your research?
This project was actually born when the original Disney version of The Lion King first came out. My colleague, Chip Gidney, and I had each seen the film and were both kind of horrified by the ways in which the evil characters were marked by dialects. We looked at each other and said, “we should do something about this.” So we started designing a way to systematically explore the depictions of gender, race, and ethnicity in kids’ animated programming.

I’d have to say that after all of these years of working on this, I still feel like there’s more we need to understand. We’re pretty clear on the fact that stereotypes still exist and, in fact, exist way more than we would have thought they would given how hyper-PC so many people in the entertainment industry often appear to be. What we’re not as clear on is just why they do. And we’re just at the beginning of the last part of the project, arguably the most important part: doing research with children to understand how they think about and process the images that they take in.

Considering the observations that inspired CTV, what is something that writers, producers, and consumers of new children’s media should think about? 
One thing is that it’s not only how characters are drawn that matters; it’s also how they sound and the context they exist in. You can draw a very diverse set of characters, but just plopping them into some generic urban or suburban background isn’t enough to make a richly contextualized environment that mirrors the environments in which real people live.

Many of your students have worked or interned at places like WGBH, Sesame Workshop, and of course FableVision! What have you enjoyed the most about watching your students branch out into the world? 
I love matching my students up with internship sites, including FableVision. There are few things more rewarding than making a good match! Internships are an incredibly important way for students to see how they can parlay what they’re learning in the classroom into industry jobs. They make great contacts, and then they’re very willing to “give back.” So, by now, I feel like I have a whole little army of former students who are working at Sesame Workshop, Nick Jr., WGBH, Fablevision, Fox Kids, Google, Sprout, and a host of other places. They know how the combination of child development and media studies can really help get you started in this industry, and they’re always willing to help a fellow “Jumbo” with a conversation, a contact, and often, a job.

How did you first cross paths with FableVision? What makes it a place that you recommend to your students when they’re looking for internships?
It actually might have been one of my former students who tipped me off to some of the incredible work that’s going on at FableVision. I’ve had enough students who’ve interned and worked there by now to know that FableVision is a place where magic happens. I also know that it’s a warm, encouraging, and creative workplace. And how many internships or job sites actually have popcorn machines?!

We heard you’re currently on a book tour—congratulations! What is your book about and what do you hope readers will gain from it?
After Emily is a mother/daughter biography of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, the two relatively unknown women who made Emily Dickinson into a household name. I hope that my book will introduce these two fascinating women who pushed the envelope on what women of their respective eras did to readers. I also hope that it will speak to everyone who themselves have had a complicated relationship with family members, and that it will shed some new light on the story of the ever-mysterious reclusive poet of Amherst.

We heard you recently ran into Marc Brown, author of the Arthur series, at one of your book events. How did it feel to officially meet the creator of such an iconic program? 
Well, Marc and I have been in touch for many years, since I helped Tufts to acquire some of Marc’s old Arthur materials when he was moving out of his home on the Vineyard. But we’d never met in person until he showed up at an event I did on my book tour in New York. It was wonderful to meet him, and I wish there had been more time!

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More about Julie:

Favorite flavor of ice cream? Coffee.

What’s a children’s book you still love to read? The Phantom of Walkaway Hill.

Best way to spend a Saturday? Puttering around in my gardens.

What’s your favorite city to visit? I’m not much of a city girl. I like visiting New York and Los Angeles, but I sure wouldn’t want to live there.