I could only take so much more of it. While I love making my daughter happy, we just completed our third full-series rewatch of Bluey. It's a terrific series, for anyone who hasn't seen it. It's about a family of Australian dogs with a mom, dad, and two girls. There is a ton of humor targeted at parents as well as plenty of imaginative storylines for children to enjoy. Episodes are eight minutes in length, so they move quickly and the animation is well-done. I really can't say anything bad about Bluey except I'm tired of watching it.
Not only was this streaming service free, but it also brought back so many memories. That's because it's filled with content that I enjoyed when I was growing up. I've enjoyed watching some of the old shows and am excited to attempt to show my daughter some on the Scholastic app that Daddy used to like. I'm also interested to see how they translate to a new generation.
Scholastic TV
Scholastic TV is a free streaming service that includes educational programming for kids from preschool and up. Classic series like Clifford, The Magic School Bus, and Goosebumps! are available for streaming.
It has brought back memories
I was amazed at some of the things I remembered
Scholastic TV is available to download on Roku and Amazon Fire TV operating systems.
As a tech journalist, I do my fair share of research on streaming services. I have used plenty of paid ones as well as ones that are free. Even in my spare time, I do a good amount of viewing on both paid and free services because there are some great offerings on those free streaming services. While I recently canceled my cable subscription to rely strictly on streaming options, I rarely used my cable to watch children's shows.
That's what made this deep dive into Scholastic fun. There are good offerings for kids on Pluto TV, Tubi, and then obvious ones like Netfilx and Disney+. But Scholastic is strictly set up for children. If you're of a certain age, you can remember attending a Scholastic book fair where books were brought into schools for purchase and they were all under the Scholastic brand. It was a simpler time when there were no e-readers and the TV shows you watched were only on cable. Speaking of those shows, many of the series on Scholastic were available after school on local channels, which is what made this a particularly nostalgic service for me.
There are shows for all ages
From younger-inspired cartoons to shows for older kids
There were plenty of shows I could show my daughter that I was excited about. Clifford the Big Red Dog is a fantastic book series that is still prominent today. When the full series is one of the first things that pops up on the screen, it was easy to show it as the books have been in our home. Clifford is fun, but it isn't the most educational show. For educational programming, something like The Magic School Bus was perfect. Watching Ms. Frizzle make science fun for her entire class was never not a treat growing up.
It still holds up to this day, as the incredibly imaginative book series makes for a triumphant time while watching TV. I had forgotten how fun The Magic School Bus was until I watched a few episodes again. Ms. Frizzle was the teacher that we all wanted growing up and now she can be shared with a new generation of kids. Those educational lessons are made for kids with a little bit more understanding of how science can work, so it will be a gradual step to show those to my daughter. Scholastic TV continues to do what it has always done: bring the books that kids love come to life.
Fun times around the holidays
This particular one was Halloween
Scholastic TV has shown that it is willing to be flexible with its layout. It has a grid-style layout with pictures of the episodes and easy-to-read descriptions of each one. It also highlights the year that the episode originally aired, which made me remember what age I was when watching these shows for the first time. The menu that is set up on the side of the app breaks the content down into age groups. There's Preschool, Younger Kids, Older Kids, and then Family Favorites.
Scholastic TV continues to do what it has always done: bring the books that kids love come to life.
The display at this time of year was for Halloween, so no matter what age group you selected, it featured Halloween favorites at the top. Of course, I had to check out Goosebumps! as soon as I could. I used to love reading the Goosebumps books as I always thought R.L. Stine was a genius. They had just the right amount of scares in them to make them perfectly palatable for someone my age when I was young. The TV series was a little bit of an easier watch than Are You Afraid of the Dark? at the time (although I did enjoy that Nickelodeon series as well.) Goosebumps seems a bit dated but is still incredibly fun. It has been updated a few times since the original series aired, but these episodes do a good job of encapsulating the books in the series.
Interested to see how this evolves
It could be a good free streaming service for a while
Just as it was a pleasure to see that it had been updated for Halloween, I'm sure Scholastic TV will highlight episodes around the winter holidays as well. I'm curious if it will come out with original content as well, as there are still books being made by Scholastic. As of now, it has over 400 hours of content available for consumption, giving you plenty of things to watch with your family. It will be interesting how this expands, if at all. But I'm just happy that to be able to show some of the things that I grew up with to my daughter. It just goes to show that keeping kids engaged with reading will always be important and being able to translate kids literature into content will always play well with families. I hope more streaming services put an emphasis on kid-friendly content. Because at the end of the day, I can only watch so much Bluey before reverting to how I was when I was between the ages of 7-12.