Well as you may or may not have seen our little bean finally made his appearance on the 19th June (check out his brief introduction post here if you’d like to see his handsome squidgy face!) so in preparation for his arrival I lined up a few lovely bloggers to guest post for us for a few days to give me and Jon some down time and some time to bond with the little dude. Don’t worry I will still be posting baby updates for you all to see as well, although if you want to keep up to date with us then check out our instagram page as they is most likely where I’ll be posting little snap shots of the man over the next few days/weeks.
As with all our official blogger guest posts we gave them just 1 prompt ‘Your Top 5…’ which means they are free to tell us about their Top 5 anything, thats what makes our guest posts so much fun, they cover a huge range of topics and can be pretty cool and pretty random! hehe!
So today to kick us off I have a post from Jessica at Babi a Fi who has written a post all about her Top 5 Preschool TV Shows, and if I am totally honest I love her picks!!! Some of these are a flash back to my childhood which is brilliant and I’m hoping this little one can be swayed more towards some of these shows. So over to Jessica…
Before the little darlings arrive, many people say they will ban their young children from watching television. Some actually succeed. I take my hat off to them. The rest of us, however, can look forward to watching a lot of kids’ TV.
And when I say a lot, I mean endless, endless, viewings of the same thing because young kids love repetition. It makes them feel reassured, empowered, and the ability to correctly predict what happens next in an episode of a show you’ve watched roughly 3,000 times is, to a toddler, one of life’s greatest achievements.
The best you can hope for is damage limitation. To guide your small person in the ‘right’ direction when it comes to their choice in telly. Or, at the very least, get in with an alternative before they discover the world’s most famous pig…
For inspiration, here are my top five preschool TV shows – and my reasoning!
#5. Rastamouse
He caused a storm of controversy a few years back for allegedly having racist overtones, and not speaking the Queen’s English. But the show is bright, funny, and the soundtrack is actually pretty good. (This will become more important to you after the 700th viewing, trust me.) It is still fairly unusual to see explicitly non-Christian characters in kids’ TV too, so the show provides a nice starting point for discussion, as well as having a fab message overall – we all mess up sometimes, but we can choose to try and make things right. (Get the DVD’s here!)
#4. Trumpton
Even if you didn’t grow up with it, the names ‘Hugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub’ are seared into the nation’s collective memory. The show itself is sweet and inoffensive, but it makes my list because of episode two, ‘Miss Lovelace and the Mayor’s Hat’. In it, the Mayor inspects the local park, and the keeper sings him this little ditty about his woes (99 problems, but having no time for rhyme ain’t one):
Sliver paper, toffee paper, dirty bit of cardboard;
Chair ticket, bus ticket, button from a dress;
Chocolate wrapper, envelope, another bit of cardboard;
Can’t they use the litter bin and not make such a mess?
Now when I need to explain what mummy does at work, I just break into song. (Get the DVD’s here)
#3. The Moomins
Created by Tove Jansson, the Moomins are a family of trolls who look like hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) who go on all kinds of adventures. The great thing is that there are various versions, something you can directly relate to a child’s behaviour. There is the happy Japanese cartoon adaptation for good children. Then there are the stop-motion and earlier animated versions for children who have been neither bad nor good. And, finally, there is a terrifying marionette version from the 1950s for children who will soon be having nightmares…(Get the DVD’s here)
#2. Funnybones / Y Sgerbydion
In a dark, dark town there was a dark, dark street
and in the dark, dark street there was a dark, dark house,
and in the dark, dark house there were some dark, dark stairs
and down the dark, dark stairs there was a dark, dark cellar
and in the dark dark cellar….
Three skeletons lived!
Did any cartoon ever have a better intro? There is lots of repetition in this show, which is wonderful for your little terrors, but it still manages to be quirky enough not to grate (as much) on the adults. Now I just need to get hold of the Welsh language version as a buffer between our front room and the shiny tracksuits of S4C’s Donna Direidi.
#1. Rainbow
Rainbow, to my mind, is the perfect preschool TV show. It’s educational, it doesn’t patronise, and every episode has a mix of story, song, and puppets speaking in weird voices. I loved it as a kid, and Marianna loves it now with the burning passion of a thousand fiery toddler temper tantrums.
The best thing about it though – better than the catchy theme tune, and better even than playing the ‘what have I seen today’s guest star in before?’ game – is that it was on the air for twenty years. That’s 1071 episodes over 23 series.
Even if we watched twenty episodes a day it could still be months before we have to see the same one again.
(It’s not, of course, as Marianna has her favourite Rainbow DVDs. But, in my darkest, sing-alonged out moments, I remind myself that the option is there…)
So there you have it Jessica’s Top 5 Preschool TV Shows. Thank you so much Jessica for stepping in while I’m a little bit busy!
What are your favourite Preschool TV Shows? Does your little one have a favourite? Have you tried to encourage some retro kids TV too?
