CBeebies and Nursery

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DD is nearly 4, is at a Primary School nursery and she's brought home a letter saying that, as a class, they are going to be talking about characters on CBeebies and comparing the childrens' achievements with various character traits of CBeebies characters. E.g
"I swam a length and felt proud, like Topsy and Tim"; "I was really creative, like Mr Maker". We've been given a handout detailing the features of each character (Tree Fu Tom, Wooly and Tig etc) I have to complete 'Wow' slips and refer her achievements to the Octonauts.....

My issue is that DD rarely watches TV at home and so doesn't know any of the CBeebies characters in great detail.
I'm not all 'worthy' and all that, but we just don't put on the telly for her and DS (6) and so they never ask for it. I'm next against TV but I'm thinking, why the need to use CBeebies as their main point of reference?

So she's going to be asked, on a daily basis, to compare her behaviours / achievements with random characters from CBeebies

AIBU to not want to go along with this?
I don't want her to think that she's really missing out on TV just because they're talking about it every day in nursery.

AND there's those 'CBeebies Universe' ads that have been playing on TV and Radio - they just show kids all siting in front of the telly / iPads ad it just grates on me. Is there no other way for our kids to learn?? Why does it need to feed into her learning at nursery?

Am I being uptight?

If it's important to you that your children don't see Cbeebies, just don't put it on. What a fuss about nothing.

Recognizing the "Characteristics of Effective Learning" ...Christ almighty. What a load of psychobabble.

Homework in nursery shouldn't be necessary anyway, and all this is just busywork for parents.

If they want to prepare children for "effective learning" later on, why encourage parents to allow their children to watch more TV?

If you are really worried about her knowing these are characters from TV, why not get the books? Most of them were book characters first - Charlie and Lola, Octonauts, Peter Rabbit etc.

Mine doesn't watch TV at all either op. I'm not allying and mighty about it, but she just isn't interested. (she's just coming up to 4).

If this was me, I'd chat to nursery about it, ask which characters they'd like her to know and then print off some pics of them and stick them on the wall. Or see if there are any books about the same characters, we have topsy and Tim, octonauts and Peter rabbit books but she's never seen the programs.

Busywork for parents doesn't happen in my house.

We don't watch CBeebies. We do watch other TV and Youtube etc.

This would be causing me a problem and I would have to say something as I would feel my DD was being "othered" and excluded.

We have things like what is your favourite book or what did you do in the holidays. The extracting the lesson is done by the nursery not at home. Eg if I give a sentence on what book DD likes then her nursery key worker will use it to ask her about that book when next her group are reading or discussing books.

'Be a helpful Umizumi' has been an invaluable strategy for getting my 4yo to help so YABU.

Haha! Thanks! (Just googled Umizumi - see, that's not CBeebies so it wouldn't do.....)

Thanks again, all - DD watches TV at her Nana's daily, but I just didn't want her to nag for it at home, what with it being reinforced at Nursery) I'm a bit like, "thanks a bunch, Nursery!"

And yes, I'm sure that characters are great and all that....

Why would your DD be excluded by characters they are discussing at school? They aren't being asked to come with an existing knowledge of them.

We don't have a TV but I'd have found that fine. By that age they knew enough about TV characters t comment along that lines. And Topsy and Tim are book characters first and mine would have known them for that.

I'm not saying that she'll be "excluded", my issue is simply with the fact that they have picked 9 characters and they do expect the children to know about them, so that they can talk about them.

She doesn't know the characters in any great detail, so when her achievements are compared to Wooly and Tig (!) then she'll just be a bit confused by it.

Then it'll be - "why can't we watch Wooly and Tig?"

She's got tons of books - I'm not going to get her new ones just to reinforce CBeebies.

Topsy and Tim are (very annoying) ones that we do know, so I guess we'll just talk about them all the time.

I think you are probably wrong that they expect all children to know all about the characters from the TV shows. They aren't using them to talk about the TV shows, they are using them to embody characteristics which they will be talking about.

You have a handout detailing which characteristics each character is being used to represent, so you can talk about them without watching TV.

I agree that they must have discussed the characteristics they are looking at for each character otherwise the lesson wouldn't make any sense. They wouldn't just assume everyone knows every character in such great detail to understand these aspects of their personality (which is the point of the lesson!)

So I don't understand your problem. What on earth is wrong with children having a bit of downtime in front of cbeebies after a day at school? Should they be sitting down to lessons in Latin or something?

My goodness-No need for the aggression....Latin ffs...

Have I said that there's anything wrong with watching it? Fine if other kids watch to wind down - good for them, but my kid doesn't.

And I just don't want to actively bring in screen time where it doesn't currently exist. There's nothing wrong with limiting screen time.

My issue is with the school promoting it, leading to a potential battle at home.