Hip Hop Harry - Where We Love To Learn




		Hip Hop Harry is a preschool, dance, musically – based, and live action program designed to entertain, educate, and inform children in the 3 to 6 year old age group. The major entertainment and educational areas that form the curriculum for this program include experiences and activities related to (a) social / emotional skills, (b) cognitive / educational skills, (c) physical / health skills, and (d) artistic / creative skills. The core approach utilized for providing the children with the educational, informational, and creative experiences contained in these four areas are the positive and age appropriate use of the popular music and dance form known as HIP HOP. Hip Hop is one of the major music and dance voices for children and youth today. Hip Hop includes art, dance, language, and music, but equally important it is an active, creative, and engaging cultural form that extends across all ethnic, class, and gender lines throughout the world. Educators have known for a long time that children learn more when they are actively engaged and interested in the learning process. The Hip Hop Harry Program uses the popularity of this art form as a vehicle for bringing educational and entertaining ideas, positive life-lessons, and prosocial values to developing children. THE GENERAL CURRICULAR GOALS Hip Hop Harry was conceived as a family friendly entertainment and educational multimedia program. Dr. Gordon Berry, our educational advisor for the show and professor emeritus in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at UCLA, stated the following: "at the heart of this program was a concern for fostering the growth and development of preschool age boys and girls within an entertaining format involving music, creative play, physical activity, prosocial life-lessons, and related educational experiences.” The basic curricular concepts running throughout Hip Hop Harry is the need to have the preschool children feel that it is a program that encourages them to explore, to create, and to learn in a safe environment of Education Through Entertainment. While the essential core of the program content centers on the social and emotional experiences of the children, the cognitive, educational, physical, health, artistic, and creative domains are all interrelated at any given point in a series of episodes. Based on these concepts related to active learning that is age-appropriately paced, the following general goals and/or objectives are created for Hip Hop Harry and its commitment to Education Through Entertainment. To create for preschool children a set of social, emotional, cognitive, health, physical, and creative experiences from which they can learn, understand, and apply to their own lives as they grow and develop. To create for preschool children, in an entertaining format, prosocial behaviors, life lessons, ideas, and role models from whom they can learn, using early problems-solving, interactive, and guided discovery skills, to relate and apply to their own experiences in the home, day care, preschool, and community of which they are a part.