OPB's ECEM Workshops

Media Literacy: This workshop teaches parents and caregivers about media literacy, media violence, active vs. passive viewing, age-appropriate television viewing, how to establish guidelines for television viewing (PDF download), and the "learning triangle" model where caregivers extend children's learning from what they see on television to reading (PDF download) and hands-on activities (PDF downloads).

Parent and Child Together Time: This workshop focuses on parents as their child's first teacher, modeling ways to encourage learning with basic items that are found around the home. For example, parents learn that baking soda and vinegar make a great science experiment, Cheerios can be used to teach math, and Popsicle sticks and fabric can be used to encourage creative play.

Mister Rogers' Mad Feelings ("What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?"): This workshop focuses on children and resolving anger, specifically how children go through different developmental stages as they begin to learn self-control, techniques for working with children when they lose control, and the philosophy that anger is an emotion that all children express and need to learn how to manage.

From Lullabies to Literacy: This workshop offers insights and strategies into emergent literacy in three areas — spoken language, reading and writing — providing parents and caregivers with techniques to help young children develop a positive attitude about literacy.

PBS KIDS Ready To Learn Service Resources used in workshops

Workshop Goals

During OPB's ECEM workshops, participants will be introduced to the following concepts:

• Understanding the significance of screen media and its role in children's lives
• Choosing age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate television programs, understanding the impact of media on children's learning, and setting viewing limits at home
• Creating and improving the literacy-rich environments at home and school
• Spending more time with children, reading together and engaging in active learning
• Understanding effective strategies for supporting children's reading activities
• Understanding effective strategies for supporting children's social and emotional development
• Understanding developmentally appropriate ways to help children toward school readiness

The Impact of OPB's ECEM Workshops

The Numbers
Between 2001 and 2005, OPB's Early Childhood Education and Media Service, formerly known as Ready To Learn, conducted 271 workshops, directly reaching 4,129 adult participants (primarily parents) and indirectly reaching an estimated 11,853 children.

During 2005-2006, OPB plans to facilitate more than 45 workshops, directly reaching at least 700 parents and indirectly reaching an estimated 1,400 children.

The Impact
In spring 2006, an OPB researcher with a Ph.D. in education conducted a small, descriptive case study centering on the recollections of workshop participants.

By talking with participants in the midst of a workshop series and coordinators who had observed several groups of parents going through the workshop series, this study uncovered three primary areas where parents and coordinators noticed the most impact:

• Making connections between television and hands-on activities with children
• Developing parenting skills with increased awareness of children's educational needs
• The value of complimentary books provided by OPB

What Program Participants Have Learned

• Participants who attended multiple workshops reported that the most important things they learned were:
• Specific hands-on activities they can try with children that are connected to television viewing with four pivotal areas noted:
  1. awareness of educational media as distinct from entertainment media
  2. ideas for melding television viewing with reading activities
  3. the need for monitoring children's television viewing
  4. using TV programming as leverage for opening conversations with children
• Parenting skills centered on observational and listening skills for being attentive to their children's development and educational needs
• Children's books as complimentary resources that extend television viewing activities: These books are also tools for reading with children, help to develop parents' comfort levels with books, and perhaps even fine-tune their own literacy skills.

What Program Coordinators Have Said

"She [Slavica, OPB's ECEM Coordinator] just brings a lot of great information about kids, and that's what the moms want to learn ... You know, they want to learn as much as they can about development and all those things; they want an opportunity to do it better, do it right. And I think that she just brings a wealth of information about kids and their development and their needs, and reports that with great materials that are valuable to the moms, so that they can actually replicate them, picking up activities with their kids. And I think that will have a long-term impact."
— Even Start Program Coordinator

"And one of the things that [parents] had said is, 'Before I never made a connection. You know connecting what they're watching to maybe some reading material.' And that's been a very big impact on them. If a child is watching a program, they like to hear about it or see it with them. They like to talk about why it's maybe not appropriate for them to watch that ... and you know there's violence and what is happening and then being able to extend that into maybe redirecting it into a reading activity or a hands-on activity."
— Migrant Family Literacy Program Coordinator

OPB ECEM Staff

Slavica Jovanovic Bubic, Early Childhood Education and Media Coordinator

For the past nine years, Slavica has planned, developed and presented OPB's media literacy workshops for parents, childcare providers and early childhood educators. Slavica has a degree in early childhood education and a great deal of experience in kindergarten classrooms and childcare centers in Europe and the United States. She is fluent in Serbian and English, as well as speaks some Russian and understands several Eastern European dialects.

Contact Slavica