Since its April 2000 premiere, Between the Lions has quickly become a mainstay in the PBS Ready To Learn initiative launched six years ago by public broadcasting, the U.S. Congress and U.S. Department of Education to help prepare children for school. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Ready To Learn teaches adults how to effectively use the rich educational content of PBS KIDS programming to build children's learning skills. PBS provides public television stations with guidance and tools to take PBS KIDS series off the television screen and into their communities. Ready To Learn stations offer activities like workshops for parents, educators and professional caregivers that teach how to combine structured television viewing, related reading, and hands-on activities to support school-readiness skills. Ready To Learn has had an enormous impact as it has taken root and blossomed across the country. Just this spring, for example, Mississippi ETV, Ready To Learn, and the producers of Between the Lions began a new initiative that reaches out to the primarily African-American and low-income population in Indianola and a Choctaw Indian community in which a large number of children speak English as a second language.
   Ready To Learn is well established in Ohio, where eight public television stations are actively involved in extending the program into their communities. "Over the last year, we've trained more than 2,000 adult caregivers," says Kathy Smith, director of early learning and outreach at WGTE in Toledo. "We also cast local parents in a series of 'Designated Reader' spots produced for broadcast on WGTE to encourage families to read to a child every day, and put together a literacy workshop called 'Getting Ready to Read' in conjunction with the other PBS stations in Ohio to focus on the importance of early literacy."
   Public television's deep and trusted connections with the community are a critical factor in the success of Ready To Learn. Margy Matthews, director of YW Child Care Connections, which serves Toledo and northwestern Ohio, turns to WGTE for needed expertise in literacy development. "We consider Kathy Smith and her staff at WGTE to be leaders in early learning. We have brought them in to lead workshops in dozens of child care facilities, libraries and community centers to teach our state's caregivers how public television can be a meaningful, interactive tool."
   "For young children, it has to be active viewing," says Barbara Walker, Ready To Learn outreach coordinator at WCET in Cincinnati, who estimates that her station's Ready To Learn workshops helped at least 6,500 children last year. "Adults need to be trained how to watch TV with their kids so they can take their children's interest to the next level."

   With its emphasis on reading, Between the Lions is a particularly valuable educational asset, but all the programs on the PBS KIDS schedule are incorporated into Ready To Learn's educational outreach. While some programs target reading and math readiness, others support the important social and emotional development that is fundamental for success at school. From classics like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood to more recent additions including Clifford The Big Red Dog, Dragon Tales and Arthur -- which has won the Emmy for best animated children's program three years running --PBS draws on its entire programming schedule to provide Ready To Learn resources. Through their familiarity with the community they serve, public television station education professionals are able to select the Ready To Learn materials that will have greatest value in their area and then build on this foundation.
   For Kathleen Acord, education network manager at KQED in San Francisco, the need for materials in Spanish and Chinese was critical. KQED raised money to have Ready To Learn materials translated and hired bilingual staff to help them tailor the content of these materials to address cultural differences. "We work through children's services agencies at about 70 different sites in the Bay Area. These agencies have longstanding relationships with families and know what it takes to help them. For maximum impact we train the staff at the agencies so they can take ownership of these literacy projects and adapt them to their own goals," Acord explains. As part of its Ready To Learn service, KQED runs a robust "First Book" program that distributes 2,000 books a month to low-income children through family literacy workshops. The workshops teach parents how to use books with their children in the most educationally effective way.
   For children, being ready to learn is not just about reading, as Krista Hunt, manager of early childhood education projects at Maryland Public Television, was reminded when she was asked to present a workshop on how to use television as an educational tool at an English as a Second Language program that serves Muslim parents from Pakistan and India living in the Baltimore area. Hunt found the participants raising such issues as fear of hate crimes and concern over looking and feeling different. "Dealing with the emotional needs of the children and their parents is just as urgent as addressing issues of literacy," she says.