Education
WITF is committed to supporting families and children through excellent educational programming and engaging, fun family events. Explore to discover more about helpful resources, community support, and ways to connect. We love to help children dream, imagine and learn more.
Located throughout our region, these events typically occur on Saturday mornings and link families, PBS characters, and learning together. With support from community agencies and sponsors, these family play dates allow children, aged 3-8, to engage with their families around meaningful, interesting content in fun, age-appropriate ways. They also get to play with their favorite PBS characters such as Curious George and Daniel Tiger. Themes for the Ready Set Explore! events are tailored to meet the needs of communities and include the arts, connections to nature, science topics like weather, animals, and space, literacy and health.
Ready, Set, Explore! Events
WITF recognizes that transitions can be tricky. To help support families and children in the transition from preschool to kindergarten, WITF has partnered with community agencies and sponsors to create Ready Set Explore! Kindergarten, an event that provides families with useful information and gives the soon-to-be kindergartners a day full of fun and memories.
WITF’s annual August event, celebrates the newest, incoming kindergarten class, and typically draws over 800 family members and kindergartners to the Public Media Center.
WITF’s Explore in the Classroom is an approved Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) program under the Education Improvement Organization (EIO) category.
Explore FREE, standards-aligned videos, interactives, lesson plans, and more for teachers and families.
Join in on all the fun on PBS Kids interactive website with character information, games and crafts.
Each spring, the WITF Central PA Spelling Bee invites 4th – 8th grade students from 10 surrounding counties to demonstrate their spelling knowledge as they attempt to make their way to the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Interested schools register with Scripps in the fall and conduct their own Spelling Bee. Winners from each of the participating schools compete in a 50 word written and 50 word vocabulary test held at the WITF Public Media Center. No more than the top 36 spellers participate in the WITF Grand Championship Spelling Bee, an oral spell down, which is broadcast on WITF TV. The Grand Championship speller qualifies to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
WITF Family Play and Learn is an innovative approach to engaging the community and bringing educational resources to spaces where children may have unstructured free time.
