Q: What's new for this season?
A: We know from our research that the high appeal and rich emotional context of Dragon Tales provide an ideal setting for learning. For our third season we have identified two new areas to emphasize–music and cultural diversity. In addition, we will introduce a new character, Enrique, who expands our cast of identifiable leads, provides us opportunities for more Hispanic content, refreshes the wonder of our fantasy world and creates new engines for story.
Q: What are the educational goals of the series?
A: Typical healthy four-year-olds are enthusiastic and curious and feel ready to take on the world–exactly the way we hope kids will be on their first day of real school. One way to support and enhance preschool children's natural predisposition toward learning is to encourage them to grapple with the challenging tasks and experiences in their lives.
We want to:
- Encourage young children to pursue the challenging experiences that support their growth and development.
- Help young children recognize there are many ways to approach and learn from the challenging experiences in their lives.
- Help young children understand that to try and not succeed fully is a natural and valuable part of learning.
Q: How will you explore the two new areas of emphasis?
A: Music: Music has always been an integral part of Dragon Tales. The opening song and our interstitial videos are enormously popular. We plan to tap into the power of music to engage and educate in a much more integral way within the stories themselves and provide new opportunities for singing and dancing along in the interstitials.
Cultural Diversity: Hispanic culture will play a more prominent role in our stories. We will utilize folk stories, folk music and children's songs and street games, for example, to promote compelling opportunities for viewer participation and a more overt recognition of the heritage and customs of children and families with Spanish-speaking backgrounds.
Q: What is the template for the new season?
A: Everything kids love about Dragon Tales returns: Max, Emmy and their dragon pals; Everyone's ideal teacher; Quetzal; The quirky inhabitants and fantastic settings; The humor; And, of course, the developmental skills and strategies–the "life lessons" the series imparts.
The big event in our new season is the introduction of Enrique, Max and Emmy's new next door neighbor, who will experience the wonders of Dragon Land with a fresh pair of eyes, allowing us to revisit the comfortably familiar in our fantastical world, yet see it all anew -: the dragon scale and the "I wish . . ." rhyme; flying on the backs of dragon friends (Zak and Wheezie); traveling via knuckerholes and bouncing in Mushroom Meadow; and understanding the significance of dragon badges. Even more important for our approach this season, Enrique provides us with new opportunities to showcase Spanish language and Hispanic culture much more explicitly within our stories.
Q: What is the educational approach?
A: We've created a magical and surprising world on the TV screen where anything might happen and our viewers get to play along with Emmy and Max (and now Enrique) and their dragon friends. One theme that pops out of our stories–regardless of the particular adventure–is that our characters are friends who care for each other. They demonstrate this caring by trying to understand and respond to their friends' feelings. This theme works two ways for us. It bolsters our appeal and it provides the rich emotional context we need in order to deliver our learning goals. We look for it in every story.
On their adventures, our characters take on the kinds of developmental challenges that children ages 3-5 take on in their lives.
Q: What kinds of challenges are you talking about?
A: There's so much that little kids want and need to learn: social challenges like getting along with friends; emotional challenges like handling rejection or accepting others' differences; physical challenges like learning to ride a bike; and cognitive challenges like following directions. What works best, we've discovered, is to emphasize the social and emotional underpinnings in each story so that the stories do not become how-to demonstrations.
Q: How is the educational content integrated into the series format?
A: In each story characters are involved in an adventure that has a dramatic goal. Along the way a character (or characters) grapples with a developmental challenge. In addition, we might develop a broader challenge that comes from the three goals of the series and there are specific ways for stories to support the three goals:
Goal 1 is about taking on challenges and being brave enough to try. It's almost a metaphor for the series and it's hard to write a Dragon Tales story that doesn't support this goal. Our characters express interest and act on it, take pleasure in figuring things out and are–if not enthusiastic at first–willing to try.
Goal 2 is about knowing there is a variety of effective approaches to solving problems, including: asking useful questions, using what you know, experimenting/using trial and error, thinking about and choosing different approaches, and asking for help. It's important that when our characters' initial attempts to face a challenge don't meet with immediate success, we hear and/or see them not giving up. Persistence is another big theme running through Dragon Tales adventures, and we want to continue to sound it loud and clear.
Goal 3 is about reframing the notion of failure–seeing that trying is a necessary step on the path to getting better or closer to your goal. An important strategy is to acknowledge explicitly the accomplishments along the way. For many children mastery is the only goal. In Dragon Tales it's important to make small or partial victories a cause for celebration. We are especially interested in ways to dramatize this notion so that children will take away this message.
|
 |
