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I've been reading these books and and it shows how to draw dragons and cars.

I like the way dragons are.

Drew and yeah, I like dragons.

I think kids should read about one hour a day or more because I like reading that much.

I was drawing a picture one day about a seahorse and then I bring it to my mom.

And then she said, Oh, do you?

On the website I saw Reading Rainbow.

And so she said, Do you want to go on Reading Rainbow?

And then I said, “yeah!

” April 2008 marked the 14th Annual KPTS Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest.

The contest is open to children in kindergarten through third grade, over 300 children throughout south central Kansas submitted stories for the contest.

It encourages children to explore the world of reading and creating their own stories, fostering a love of literacy is a key component of the KPTS Education Mission.

The Reading Rainbow Contest is actually affiliated with the Reading Rainbow Program that is aired on PBS station.

It's narrated by LeVar Burton and he is the one that actually is featured in a lot of the publicity for it.

So you might recognize it from him, from some of the publicity, but actually it's a nationwide contest that is put out into the public through PBS stations.

So we have several stations.

I'm not sure exactly how many across the country, but we have many stations that actually participate in it.

And some of them are very small and tiny and others grow in different ways and get huge.

And ours has gotten to the point where we've kind of deviated and grown it in different ways and we are trying to grow it and get it into all the different communities that we actually serve as a public television station.

It gives us a lot of ideas of writing books, like I'm like, you copy off one page and then you start it from a different you only get one like picture from the movie.

And then I'm like, You can make a different pick, a different story, but that same picture, this is my.

Poem book.

That does help children to want to learn, to communicate.

The show itself is what started it.

And seeing kids get very interested in giving book reviews and telling a little bit about the story and then actually working into the history behind that story or the author behind that story.

That's what really learning about literacy is all about.

That's how you spark the interest.

And when you can spark the interest by using either that television program or by getting kids involved in writing and illustrating for themselves, that's when you begin to really comprehend and get a grasp on literacy.

Hi.

Im Luke Torgerson and I won second place for art in the KPTS Reading Rainbow Contest.

Well, I decided to do it.

And then we had this a long time to do it.

But we never really got into the idea.

So then one day I said I'd write the story and I did.

The name is Dragon Adventure.

And it's when a boy is walking along the road that people said it had A dragon cave in it, and then rocks are falling and he sees a dragon cave, but.

And then he sneezes and he's like, Wow, I can't breathe fire.

So lets give him a cough drop and then he gives him up.

And then it was a picture of him sneezing and then him getting the cough drop.

And then the dragon says, then, then the dragon turns around and fire says, while you can breathe fire and and the dragon says, thank you.

Now I promise never get to go out in the cold again.

And and for your kindness, I will fly you back.

And never to bother the people again.

Because he frightens the people in the valley my favorite part is when you're at the beginning it doesn't look good.

But at the end it looks great.

And I just like that.

There really wasn't a lot of encouragement.

He really wanted to do it himself.

I would.

I'd have to say that the desire was there, and so all we really had to do was just kind of help him, you know, format the story a little bit.

I mean, it was kind of rough at first, but we we talked about, you know, what the boy was going to do and how he was going to interact with the dragon and that went that went okay.

And so we got through the story part of it.

Then with it, with the, the artwork, you know, he was really excited about doing it and spent most of the time on that and getting the the pictures just right.

He's very much a perfectionist, I found.

And so, you know, if if something wasn't right, he would redo it a couple of times until he was really happy with the way it looked.

So it wasn't hard.

And, you know, for the encouragement in doing it, it was just kind of directing him and helping him along.

My mother paints and draws and my brother as well.

My grandfather was an artist too, so skipped me but went to him.

If you go to my grandmother's house and there's lots of there's a lot of paintings over here.

Yeah, we do of hers.

There's one in our upstairs in her bathroom, the scowl of our dog awful lot.

But I thought it would be fun project kind of for him and his grandmother to sort of have some time together to do because she was an English teacher for so many years and also the art, she can help him with that and they can have some time bonding time the two of them.

And our second grade special art awards.

Second place, The Dragon Adventure by Luke Aslan Torgerson from Wichita.

When, when we went to the awards ceremony and when I got to second grade and she said all the people that won an award come up to the front and get your trophies and go in front of all those people Im kind of nervous in front of crowds, I guess.

Yeah.

I thought like mostly every that there was a few people that that didn't get trophies.

But then Mom told me, a whole bunch of people like 340 something, 300 something people entered it, only 34 people out of that got trophies.

And I was one of them and I'm like, Wow.

I really think that KPTS has really done a great job in promoting the kids, in really wanting to write and be creative and doing things that that may they not have an opportunity to do in all the other activities.

You know, they they've got, you know, school and sports and things like that, but not necessarily do they have an opportunity to to be encouraged to write and to artwork and really have, you know, the benefits seen, you know, from that.

And so I really think that it's encouraged Luke to do something that he wouldn't normally have an opportunity to do.

So we're really excited about him being able to do it and doing so well.

One of our stories last.

In the months leading up to the contest, KPTS conducts free literacy programs throughout Kansas.

The workshops explore different ways to interpret and tell stories, and they also encourage children to experiment with different art mediums and illustrating their stories.

What we do is go out into the community.

We do the workshop, and the workshop consists of the kids really getting busy with hands on things and learning how to communicate through the art part of it.

And they learn several different techniques, whether it's using paste watercolors rather than the little cake watercolors or whether it's using chalk or tape to cover up the piece of their project and then pulling it off.

Those are the kinds of techniques that they learn for the art part of it.

But then we also go into how do you read and write a story?

Stories have to have beginnings, middles and ends.

And we take it to the very basic because we are working with kindergartners as well as the third graders.

So if you hear terminology that might not be your third grade level, remember we have to go to the kids that are at the lowest level and we're going to start talking to them about the beginning.

The middle and the end.

I wasn't at the the workshop.

My mother took him to that.

But she was impressed with how it was run as far as giving the kids the different exposure to different types of artwork.

You could use paper.

Or.

Or charcoal or watercolor, those different mediums.

Just items like pipe cleaners or cloth.

But lots of different, different ideas.

And then also just the idea of what is a story, you know, what's who are the characters, what are their problem, how are they going to resolve their problem?

And and follow that kind of pattern?

So it was it was very helpful to have that as a starting off point for him to to go, okay.

And once you start reading to them and they realize you're not just going to read them a story, but you're going to actually get them involved in the process.

It's amazing to see the transformation that takes place in a child's enthusiasm, in their face, in their actions.

They go from being kind of quiet and timid to really experimenting.

And once you give them some things without telling them that this is the end result and you let them experiment and practice with them, you begin to see the things that they can do on their own.

They begin to identify the fact that they can get very creative and they get very bold.

And it's amazing to see them come from not communicating very well to really communicating in complete sentences and then expressing themselves with the art part of it.

And remember, we're doing it.

You're not drawing a full page.

It's like opening doors.

It's like exploring new things for yourself because it's not just what I show them and then they do.

It's what they turn around and do and show me.

Hi, my name's Alayna Smith.

And down here says Reading Rainbow 2008, imagine story Alayna Smith first grade and my story is called if I live under the sea about my story is that it's out of the woods.

If I lived under the sea, I would search for seashells.

And then the next point you can make in my story by coloring it and writing stuff like get to imagine yourself and it's hard to draw sometimes I imagine like hmm Oh yeah, an octopus.

And so I will.

I play hide and go seek with an octopus in the world.

I like a wave like that.

I guess if I lived under the sea I would play hide and go seek with a octopus.

Yeah, well, just every day we spend a little bit of time, and she was.

Before school That we would just sit down and she would just she came up with all the pictures, the ideas, the words.

I just sort of was a guideline.

You want to make sure she was on the right track and that was just a fun process.

We really enjoyed doing it and she's very creative and loves to draw and colors.

So her teacher suggested actually, I was at school volunteering and her teacher said, Is Alayna going to do the Reading Rainbow contest?

And I said, Oh, well, we were thinking about it, but I'm not sure.

And she says, Well, you really should encourage her.

So it was really thanks to her, her first grade teacher.

We didn't even know anything about there being trophies.

And at the awards ceremony, we walked into the the Augusta School there, and Alayna immediately saw the trophies at the front of the room.

There was hundreds of kids that entered.

We didn't think she'd got a trophy.

We didn't know.

And Alayna, she sees the trophies.

It's like, well, when do I get my trophy?

We didn't know she'd won a trophy.

And she just gets so excited and she's like, Oh, yeah trophy!

And then sure enough, we saw her name on the overhead and we're like, Wow, you know, we were so proud of her.

And also her taking it to school showed other kids that didn't think about entering.

This is kind of neat.

It's kind of fun.

And I was the only one was doing it in the class.

Yes.

Yeah.

So shows other kids.

It's fun.

So I think it's extremely important if your parents the parents are kids, you know, reading, they don't buy the books for the children.

The kids arent going to learn to read.

So, you know, we we've laid all that groundwork.

We buy the scholastic books from school and, you know, read their bedtime stories.

That's dad's job is bedtime stories.

Usually he does that and and I'm at home with with the girls.

And so, you know, I help Alayna with her homework and yeah, I think it's just really important is for them to see you reading too, you know, in the newspaper or a book or whatever.

Just make it part of the daily routine.

Well, I think just kids in general and and Alayna as well.

I mean, it's important that they get it.

We think it's a head start.

They get a head start on on on reading, using their imagination.

Instead of just watching TV all the time and she's combining that with her artwork just really fosters her her imagination and her use of words and vocabulary.

And and we've always really stressed that.

Once the deadline for the stories have passed, the judging begins.

Stories are categorized by grade level and judged on overall concept, writing, style and illustrations.

Judging for art awards is conducted separately by specialized art teachers and artists.

Judging began with breakfast on Saturday and continued through the late evening.

What I've seen in the progression in the past three years where we have really aggressively gone out to the different communities and done workshops for the children, I'm seeing bold technique, I'm seeing even color.

I mean, it's gone from being just pen and ink or crayons to really expanding with collage materials with very bright and vivid colors.

They just everything they're doing, they're doing some collages and cutting out pieces out of different wallpapers and putting them together.

They're actually even putting depth perception.

Another one that we have is a totally different entry this year that we've never had anything like it before is where the child actually shot photographs, but they took the photographs and then incorporated them into the story and drew around them.

And it was just a fabulous interpretation of this child's story.

And the story went very well with the illustrations.

But I've seen, kids that have done everything from being a great artist and then really struggling to write that story.

And then I've seen other kids who can write a great story and really struggle to illustrate.

And then I see other kids that just experiment and absolutely have a blast.

You know, we've had the stories come in bags.

We've had stories that were so thick we had to photograph them.

You couldn't just scan them.

So each year it's something new and something different.

And it seems like their creativity just never ends.

So what story did you write?

Pablos Piñata Party.

Great.

That sounds interesting.

So what's it about?

Well, it's about a chihuahua who ordered food for his piñata party.

And the truck is not there when he needs it to be there.

And so he goes out to look for it and he finds piñatas and flowers and he buys those for his friends to make the piñata better, I really like Mexican culture so I like doing stuff with that and so I decided, well, why not just write a book about a dog?

And he's Mexican.

So I got the idea... My name is Lauren Voight, and I wrote a book called Pablo's Piñata Party.

I thought, well, I really like being Mexican.

Let's put some Mexican into the story.

And that's how I came up with my idea.

And I love food.

So I kind of put that in.

You can learn a lot from reading and you can learn about people and history and different things like that and it's really fun and exciting and you enter new worlds and writing.

It gives you a chance to use your imagination and your mind.

So that's some reasons I really like about reading and writing.

I can do funny things with food, like Make two... what are those called... enchiladas, like dancing or peppers, things like that, and do different things with the food.

And I just really love drawing and it's really fun for me.

I think from when she was born, we always try to read stories for bedtime and make sure that we have a story time with her to sit.

That plus, just once she did start reading.

It's, you know, we'll sit and read with her or have her read to us a little bit.

And it just becomes some part of our family time that we're together.

So I think encouraging the reading, if you're doing it in the home already, that's a reinforcement for what you're teaching your children.

I've noticed, especially Lauren, but just her level of comprehension.

She's able to read at a eighth grade level, but we are very selective about what she reads and so is she.

But she's able to read at a seventh and eighth grade level, and I think a lot has to do because she started reading at such a young age and she expresses her.

I mean, she read she expresses herself as well as and we noticed they read with a lot of expression.

And we think that when you have a TV station like KPTS that's also reinforcing that, encouraging the children, that it just makes it easier for them because they see it from a different source, from a fun source, and they do.

You guys make it very fun and very easy for them to watch.

This year KPTS hosted three separate award ceremonies in Wichita, Pratt and Augusta.

The goal was to reach out and recognize those children that submitted stories in their own communities.

I guess one of the stories that had a very long, long title, Some Adventures of Chocolat and Vonilla, would probably be one of the things that just rings in my mind, because it was at one of the events, and the young lady that wrote the story had made it more like a cartoon and kind of given the cartoon strips and then a narrative.

Well, the narrative was very easy to follow, but when you're trying to read it and explain it for a larger group and make sure that you read the bubbles in the right order, it can get a little confusing.

And we handed out the awards and the little girl came up and she was so excited and just so verbal.

And when it came time to actually read the stories and do the PowerPoint presentation, I said something like, Well, how would you like to come up and help me read this?

And boy, she just jumped up at the opportunity and the interaction between her and I reading the story.

It was lovely.

There is a problem at Wilburs Ice Cream Shop.

Yes.

This calls for, this is a job for Chocolat and Vonilla.

Ill call them for help, ring ring.

The name of my story is The Adventures of Chocolat, Chocolat and Vonilla versus the Evil Forces of Captin Ice Cream Snitcher and his Cronies, Spoon, Scoop and Bowl.

And it's basically about two superheroes saving the world from villains who like ice cream.

My issue was I was having a sleepover with my friend, and we wanted to write a comic book and it just came up that we wanted to be superheroes for our favorite flavors.

And I'm Chocolate and my friends Vanilla.

Caitlin did the story.

Caitlin did the drawing, though.

She got a little bit of help with the drawing.

No, I did.

I did the writing because.

Some of the little word bubbles were hard to write.

Did the lettering?

Yeah.

Okay.

So she wrote the story.

She drew it, she lettered it.

We all colored it.

Yeah.

And Dad messed up.

I messed up on the coloring.

One page on the coloring because.

She had it all plotted out with.

The super ice cream.

But it was supposed to be vanilla and chocolate, but she made it green and purple.

But I was trying to be colorful.

I'm like, its not lime and blueberry!

It's chocolate and vanilla!

So we had to draw that whole page again.

Yes, that was very traumatic.

That was that was the biggest obstacle we overcame in pursuit of the finished product.

Dads mess up.

I think the funnest thing was like coming up with the bad things that kept in ice cream sandwich, it was like one of the worst things she did was flooding the town with whipped cream.

And he captured Captin.

He captured Wilbur from the ice cream shop.

But before he captured it, it was just hilarious.

And my drawing Bowl was karate chopping Wilbur.

And then they gagged him, threw him outside, took his whipped cream and fled the town.

And I enjoyed doing my voices.

I kind of got I kind of got the voices from my mom.

Because when we read our book or the book, stories we're reading.

Let's do accents for some of the characters.

She does a British accent for Prince Charming.

Thats the one that can do well.

You know, you do the Australian very well.

I do Australia.

Well, I'll say.

You do Russian good too.

Oh, thanks.

I like your Baba Yaga.

She's always been a bit of a performer.

And so that was kind of it was kind of fun for her to be able to go in and read it.

I think that was exciting.

Ah, a day at the beach.

Yes, the perfect wave.

So if it really doesn't matter what they learn, it doesn't matter what they read, it doesn't matter what they write, matters that they are reading.

It matters that they are writing.

It matters that they are talking.

Because if you develop a habit, if you develop a familiarity with I mean, just the basic mechanics, the the psychological mechanics of picking up a story and imagining what's going on and trying to picture it in your mind and trying to make connections between what happens in this chapter and that chapter.

You develop those very, very basic skills early on.

You'll be able to transform them later on in your life to any context.

You could transfer them to science, you could transfer them to literature, you could transfer them to anything.

So if you talk to your children, if you get them talking, if you get them reading, if you get them writing, that probably matters more than any particular thing.

You can have them read or have them write when they're very young.

As long as they're doing it.

KPTS is committed to promoting literacy in Kansas communities more than 160,000 children in a year participate in its literacy education programs.

KPTS is an important role in the development of children throughout South Central Kansas.

I think it's very important for us as KPTS to be out into the community and involved in the Reading Rainbow contest because this is part of literacy.

And literacy is one of the key focuses for us with early education and it's what our programing is really all about.

Reading Rainbow The program is one of those that really highlights that.

And for the kids to be involved in something that they can also see on TV even makes it that much easier to get them involved in something that maybe is not always presented as something fun to do.

Writing isn't always one of those things that you think about being fun, and yet these kids can go to workshops, they can get involved in it and start writing stories and seeing other kids stories and really get a love of not only reading, but enjoying the pictures, understanding the stories, finding out the history behind it.

And that's what the program Reading Rainbow really does.

And it encourages children to do that.

So if we can make that happen in reality rather than just on television, how much better can it be for a kid?