The A-Team Research Project

My audacious idea is to use television to help children learn their letters and, maybe, even to read.  This may be a surprising suggestion given that TV is cited as a main reason for the decline in children’s reading.

First, children watch a lot of TV – on average four hours a day, which turns out to be more time than they spend in school each year. Second, having print and reading materials at home helps kids learn to read. And, the more they read, the better they read. Unfortunately, more than 30% of city children live in poor households which tend to have few books or reading materials.  One study found that poor families had, on average, less than one book per household. The third reason is that TVs must all have the technology to show captions and most programs and movies must have written transcripts. So, if you turn on your TV’s captioning feature, the words that are spoken – and many of the sounds as well – will appear in writing at the bottom of your screen.