micklaq hedwiga yardlee

[Jennifer Curtis]

Jeremy Konner: [When we first came up with the idea] it was in the model of Food Network cooking shows. But a lot has changed in the last decade in the landscape of food television. And this is a world that now has Chef's Table and Ugly Delicious, and Salt Fat Acid Heat, and this is really what we got excited about: How do we put puppets and kids into this world and make it more about culture, and excitement about food rather than cooking it? One of the core tenets is that we never talk about food being good for you. We never talk about food being bad for you; we never talk about health food. When Samin Nosrat is eating some incredible bite of something in the streets of Japan, she's not talking about vitamin content, right? We want kids to eat a piece of broccoli, not because it's good for you, but because it's good.

ET: Waffles and Mochi is a show about a love of food. It's not a love of healthy food. It's a love letter to food in general, foods from all around the globe. There's this healthy side effect when you start cooking at home, and the goal isn't necessarily to eat more vitamins or work your way up the food pyramid. It's simply to be excited to get in the kitchen and cook with your friends and family.

JK: No food pyramid. Food is good for you; we believe that. When we first researched this show, we met with Eleanor Oaks, an anthropologist at UCLA, who won the MacArthur Genius grant for studying family and dinnertime dynamics. And she compared American families to those of different cultures around the world. In one study, they followed these families around, giving them cortisol tests throughout the day, and it turned out that dinner time was the most stressful time for families across the board. We really fell in love with this idea of trying to make dinnertime more fun, making it easier.

ET: That was our focus at every step because if you're going to make a show about food, especially for kids, I think you want to have all voices and palates at the table, literally and figuratively. Because there's no one story about food, everyone has their own individual experiences that may ladder up to culture for them. We really wanted it to represent real kids and their real experiences. What's strange for one kid is really familiar and exciting to another.

ET: I feel like that's Jeremy's filmmaking DNA from Drunk History, where they do a lot of locations that are built on the fly and there's something really fun and realistic about it. I had a more cheesy version in my head and I was really excited when I got to set that day. I was like, whoa, this looks like Mars.

JK: You know, I love seeing the strings, I love seeing somebody's hand or seeing the puppet rods. I think that was a huge thing in designing the puppets, that we wanted to see the puppet rods because I think that makes it a little more accessible for kids. It's not quite as magical; it feels like, oh, I could maybe do this.

ET: And when we reconnected, there was this new travel focus. We thought, well the characters can't be from our world, right? They can't be from any country on our planet because we really wanted them to be immigrants to the whole world. We wanted them to start from a place of a little knowledge about food, but a ton of curiosity. So Jeremy and I were thinking about making them space aliens, or creatures from another dimension. And then we landed on this Kimmy Schmidt-esque idea where they maybe had been locked in the frozen food aisle their whole lives, in the land of frozen food.

JK: When you make a show with the Obamas, when you make a show with a global company like Netflix who has a presence in 190 countries, there are a lot of people who want to see the show more diverse and more representative. That could not be more exciting, right? It feels like if we had made this just a few years ago, or with different people, they would be saying, "But how's this going to connect with American kids?"

JK: Erika and I are the Waffles and Mochi of our production. We are not food people; we just love food. We watch food, we're obsessed with it, but we are not part of this world. So we're going in with unbridled enthusiasm and saying, "Teach us." We want to go to the best people, we want to go to people who are telling different, unique stories that we don't know. And we want them to tell their stories and show us how they cook.

JK: So what we had to do was break precedent across all of children's programming and go with what is called UN-style dubbing, where you hear the person speaking in their language first, and then you start the dub. So it's clear this is not the language of this kid. They're speaking a different language and we will be translating it to you. We were very nervous that kids would not understand what was happening. Why are they speaking two languages? Why do we hear some sounds and then translate later? But we showed it to a bunch of kids and there were zero problems. And so we're really excited about that.

JK: When we went to Venice, Italy, Gillian said to us, "Let's not meet with the most famous Italian chef in Venice; let's meet with this guy, Hamed. He owns a restaurant that is all run by refugees. And he's an Afghani refugee. Let's try to subvert our expectations of what Italian food can mean." And that's something that we wanted to do across the board: subvert expectations for kids and subvert expectations for adults.

Now is a great time for children to learn a foreign language. Research shows that people learn languages much more easily in childhood than they do in adulthood. In addition to that, learning a second language comes with a ton of benefits including better opportunities later on in life.

As mentioned before, interaction is paramount. At TruFluency Kids, we believe in the Bellieu Method. The Bellieu Method in summary is making communication the forefront of language learning, using relevant, everyday vocabulary that everyone will use on a daily basis. We believe in focusing on listening and speaking, just like kids learned their first language.

For working and single parents with small children, one of the less dire but still persistent challenges of staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic has been finding ways to educate and entertain kids while working from home.

As the daughter of a media scholar whose research revolves primarily around representations of gender and race, my six-year-old has very little tolerance for shows and movies without compelling female characters.

Based on the 1980s cartoon parents might remember from the Saturday mornings of our childhoods, the She-Ra reboot (developed by Noelle Stevenson) features a familiar cast in wonderfully updated new incarnations.

Now a reformed thief, Carmen hopes to expose her former V.I.L.E. colleagues, destroy their operation and donate the stolen goods to charity. The show is better suited to older children due to the complexity of its story line, but the appeal of a Robin Hood/James Bond type action heroine is timeless.

Developed by Lauren Faust (creator of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), the new DC Super Hero Girls show is based on a popular web series of the same name. Like its predecessor, the show features a host of familiar comic book villains and heroes as teenagers in 10-15 minute mini-episodes.

You can easily download Netflix shows for long trips and flights while sneaking in a dash of Chinese learning! With this ultimate guide to Chinese Netflix cartoons and live-action shows, your kids will always have something to watch.

Does your child prefer cute animal heroes, LEGO characters, busy vehicles, brave robots, or animated people? These popular Chinese Netflix shows are geared for toddlers, preschoolers, Kindergarteners, and elementary school-aged kids.

Dr. Betty Choi is a Harvard-trained pediatrician and mother on a mission to connect families through language and play. Chalk Academy was inspired by her trials and triumphs with relearning a heritage language and raising bilingual children in a monolingual community. Dr. Choi's advice has been featured in PBS, Parents, Healthline, The Atlantic, and VeryWell.

Sylvanian Families, launched by Japanese game company Epoch in 1985, began as a line of woodland creature action figures and their dollhouse homes, allegedly created to enthral children growing up in the high-rises of the bubble period. The anthropomorphic critters live in the fictional Sylvania, an idyllic rural town populated by close-knit families and friends. Their adventures have been chronicled in several games and TV shows over the years, with the most recent series from 2017-2019 streamed by Netflix and Amazon. The stars of the franchise are the rabbits, and especially Chocolat Usagi-chan, making it slightly more popular with little girls. Like Nontan, this show offers moral lessons about friendship, family and togetherness, but with less mischief than the former on this list.

This catchy 45-minute show is a great way to practice Japanese hiragana. Hello Kitty and her friends sing and dance to a musical version of the hiragana syllabary, complete with cute storylines, beginning by helping the sad Queen Ant (A-ari) find her Ant Prince (O-Oujisama). My daughter was especially drawn to the Sa-Shi-Su-Se-So song and story with its summery and beachy theme: Sa-Sakana (fish), Shi-Shima (island), Su-Suika (watermelon), Se-Semi (cicada), So-SofutoKuriimu (soft serve). The end of the show also features a game section directed at preschoolers, asking them, for example: which sound is rain?

Caitie also provides great crafts and activities that parents can reproduce with children to promote hands-on learning. The field trips she includes are also wonderful, often presented in a social-story format to places meaningful to children, such as trips to the dentist or to get a haircut.

An Australian animated series, Bluey is unique in that the themes and lessons it provides during its programming can be much less direct. The show is centered around Bluey, her sister, and her parents as they go on adventures through imaginative play. The main characters are often shown during their everyday life, but unlike many shows, the parents are just as invested in the shared game as the children.

90f70e40cf