Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

For Kids | For Parents | Meet the Characters

 

Welcome Teachers to Daniel Tigers’ Neighborhood, a new animated program for pre-schoolers aged 2-4 which builds on the legacy of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This new series, for a new generation of children, tells its engaging stories about the life of a preschooler using musical strategies grounded in Fred Rogers’ landmark social-emotional curriculum. Through imagination, creativity and music, Daniel and his friends learn the key social skills necessary for school and for life.

 

 

 

Social-emotional development and academic success are much more related than many people think. We often hear talk about the academic curriculum or the social-emotional approach to early education as if these are two separate things. Research tells us that for children to be successful in school, they must be mentally healthy and they must have good interpersonal skills. Emotional development skills include the ability to regulate behavior, to manage feelings, to feel competent in completing tasks, and confident in trying new things. To help boost these invaluable skills among preschoolers, each episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood consists of two engaging stories that center on a common early learning theme with catchy, musical strategies that reinforce each theme and that preschoolers and adults will both sing – and use! – together in their daily lives.

 

Daniel Tiger in the Early Childhood Classroom

Beginning later this fall, you will be able to access many Daniel Tiger video clips, strategy songs, and activity ideas to support early childhood learning and lessons. Here's one example:

That's Disappointing: Strategy Song and Activity: Disappointments are part of everyone’s life. Through this activity and video from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, children can learn to recognize this feeling, give a name to it and rehearse some ways to handle the disappointments in their lives. In the supporting Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood activity, children will learn about recognizing feelings and expressing them in appropriate ways. The activity includes questions to ask children about disappointing times and suggestions for managing these feelings. Children will interact with these concepts by creating a puppet show, making up a story, or reading related books.

 

More Information: Learning Goals of the Show

A growing body of research is confirming what Fred Rogers knew all along: social and emotional competencies are the very foundation of academic achievement and a full life. Two and three year-olds are only just beginning to explore a world outside of their home and learning to become increasingly independent, but they still need a great deal of guidance from adults to help them navigate new social situations and new places. Although children of this age might be learning pre-academic skills, such as the alphabet and counting, they also need to learn pro-social skills, such as sharing, taking turns, self-control, listening, and developing positive self-esteem. Only with these skills are they truly ready to learn.

Child Development Strategies: With Daniel Tiger as our guide, the series offers a fun, safe place for young children to explore their ever-expanding world, and teaches them developmentally appropriate pro-social strategies. Each episode has one social-emotional theme, explored in a way that’s relatable and generalizable, but never preachy. Examples of the theme are repeated more than once in different situations, to ensure comprehension.

Music: Music plays an important role in the series, as it did in the original Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: Daniel is an expressive, artistic and imaginative character, and music highlights his fantasy life. In each episode he has an "imagination moment" where he plays out a fun preschool fantasy set to music. For instance, on a picnic, he wonders what it would be like to be as small as the ants! The singable, repeatable strategies taught in the series are reprised in a full song at the end of each story – a fun and useful take-away for kids and grownups.

Research: Research tells us that preschoolers who are engaged and interacting are preschoolers who are learning. In this series, Daniel shares his thoughts and engages the home viewer with open-ended questions to draw them in. And for a three-year-old, there’s nothing more engaging than humor. The fun in Daniel evolves from the characters and situations, is preschool-appropriate – visual and silly – with no sarcasm, irony, or subtlety.

The stories in the series have all been written with extensive input from a wide range of early learning specialists, formative research with children, and the benefit of the legacy of over forty years of the work of Fred Rogers. It all adds up to a powerful tool for parents – an entertaining but thoughtful parenting guide for today’s families that integrates music, interactivity and a research-based curriculum.