We're using Hooked on Phonics' newly revised curriculum to teach our five-year-old daughter Z to read. A lot of that learning centers around word families, groups of short words with similar endings (basically, they rhyme) that can be easily learned as a group. This is the first of a series of posts that collects fun Sesame Street clips that can help kids learn words from different word families. Each post will collect 2-3 word families. Enjoy!
I'd have to know you a little better personally to have any idea whether you would find the following videos extremely annoying or endearing and funny. I do know, however, that any child in the vicinity who is between the ages of four and eighteen is going to love Alexei Alexeev's KJFG series, which I discovered yesterday on Drawn.
Interestingly, the YouTube tributes to KJFG #5, while undeniably annoying, may actually improve the flavor of the original, if you liked these cartoons already. Note that these tributes are coming out of Japan, Russia, and Brazil, respectively.
Annoying, right? But now that you've sat through one or two, watch the originals at the top. They're even better. - Jeremiah
The American director's adaptation of Roald Dahl's excellent Fantastic Mr. Fox, opened over the weekend at the London Film Festival. The film opens in the U.S. on November 25. It's rated PG for "action, smoking, and slang humor," so I'll be voting to take Z straight to the theater. We'll read the book either before or after.
Nice to see new, playful work in stop-motion by a major director that has a different perspective than Henry Selick's trademark style. Stop-motion can look many different ways, and it's easy to forget that if there aren't enough active practitioners. - Jeremiah
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