Between the Lions Season 1 [DVD]

Amazon.com

Between the Lions is an Emmy Award-winning, PBS children's television show that focuses on phonics and early reading skills in an entertaining format featuring puppetry, animation, live action, and plenty of music. Lion puppet parents Theo and Cleo, with some help from their children Lionel and Leona, run the local library for human and animal patrons alike, vowing always to be helpful, designated readers who never eat their customers. Each of season one's 30 episodes begins with the Lion family reading a story--anything from classic Greek myths, to Old West stories and tongue twisters--with animated pages that spring to life and spark the imagination of young reader Lionel and his pre-school-age sister Leona. Click, the ever-helpful computer mouse, often clicks and drags a main character from the featured story right into the library where it interacts with the Lion family and helps take reading, imagination, and comprehension to a whole new level for the young lions as well as young viewers . Lots of fast-moving, regular segments punctuate each episode--there's the animated "Adventures of Cliff Hanger" where the hero is perpetually hanging from a branch on the side of a cliff and must use his decoding skills to read a survival manual and save himself, "Martha Reader and The Vowelles" where vowel sounds are celebrated and sung on-stage in full voice, and "Word Doctor" with the real Dr. Ruth (Wordheimer) dedicating herself to helping puppets sound out impossibly long words and empowering simple words to exchange a letter or two for a whole new meaning in life. There's also "Gawain's World" which features two armored knights adorned with letters and letter combinations who crash into one another to form new words, animated "Chicken Jane" stories that read like updated "Dick and Jane" readers with words highlighted as they are spoken, the silly clown "Arty Smartypants" who combines single words to form compound words by shaking them around in his oversized clown pants or by invoking his own special magic word, a live-action writer Babs Caplan who frequents the library looking for a quiet place to write and a little help polishing her stories, and a host of other regularly recurring segments that kids love. Music of every imaginable genre including jazz, rock, Broadway, country, and folk permeates every episode and plays an integral part in both aural learning and as a memory aid. Far more than a simple phonics lesson, Between the Lions is a wonderful program that aspires to make every young viewer a life-long lover of reading. Aimed squarely at Kindergartners, Between the Lions is also appropriate for preschoolers through first- and second-graders. --Tami Horiuchi