As podcast popularity soars among kids and families, PBS KIDS continues to deliver free, engaging, and entertaining content for young audiences nationwide. Just in time for the back-to-school season, things will kick off in September on the PBS KIDS Video App with a new original podcast series, Jamming on the job, which introduces kids to a variety of interesting jobs while helping them see how their own interests and skills relate to those of the professionals they meet in the series. An eagerly anticipated third season of The Arthur Podcast, the hit podcast based on the well-loved, long-running animated series, will premiere this November. And in January, Playdate with the Wombats! will launch, fulfilling many kids’ wishes for playdates with the characters they know and love from the animated preschool series Work it out Wombats!.
“We’re so excited to introduce kids to fresh, fun podcasts that we hope will get the whole family listening, learning, and enjoying these audio adventures together,” said Sara DeWitt, Senior Vice President and General Manager, PBS KIDS. “In addition to inviting them to ‘rock out’ with new friends while they learn with Jamming on the job, The Arthur Podcast and Playdate with the Wombats!, these podcasts will give kids opportunities to further connect with characters from some of their favorite shows in unique, new ways.”
A multi-generational, music-centered podcast for kids ages 4-8 and their families, Jamming on the job stars Christina Sanabria and Andrés Salguero, the Latin Grammy Award-winning kids’ music duo known as 123 Andrés. Listeners will join Christina and Andrés as they tour the United States performing songs about the “world of work.” At each tour stop, they meet a grownup with an interesting job who helps them solve a problem. As the duo learns about the “career-of-the-day” and the skills needed to be successful in that job, they then write a brand new song about it with help from their magic music-making machine: BoomBox, voiced by Grammy-nominated musician Pierce Freelon. Featured jobs include a nurse practitioner, prescribed fire manager, language instructor, robotics engineer, and more.
In addition to giving kids a window into a wide variety of career paths, each episode of the new series highlights foundational skills relevant to each job such as empathy, social problem-solving, and responsibility, as well as flexible thinking, impulse control, and persistence. Developed as a part of the Ready To Learn Podcast Accelerator program, Jamming on the job, produced by PBS North Carolina and brought to listeners in partnership with PRX, premieres September 14. Listen to the podcast trailer here.
Starting November 9, Arthur Read is back with a whole new season of The Arthur Podcast, produced by GBH Kids together with Gen-Z Media and distributed in partnership with PRX. Currently, THE ARTHUR PODCAST is the #1 PBS KIDS podcast with nearly 5M streams and 1.3M downloads across podcasting platforms this year-to-date.** Families can listen-in as the world-famous aardvark goes on some of his favorite adventures, featuring D.W., Buster, and all their friends from Elwood City. Each episode is an audio adaptation of a story from the series with some new commentary from Arthur himself, in addition to Arthur’s Inbox, a question-and-answer portion that includes responses from listeners everywhere.
And starting January 4, 2024, the Playdate with the Wombats! podcast will welcome kids ages 3-6 to take part in fun-filled playdates with Malik, Zadie, and Zeke, the marsupial sibling stars of the hit PBS KIDS series Work it out Wombats!. The Wombats will excitedly welcome listeners to take the role of “Wombuddies” on an interactive playdate and encourage them to answer questions, count, sing, dance, and use their imaginations. Like the series and digital games, the new podcast, produced by GBH Kids and Cultural Whisperers, reinforces computational thinking skills and encourages listeners to put them to use by identifying and copying patterns and connecting the cause to the effect.
Jamming on the job and Playdate with the Wombats! join the existing library of PBS KIDS podcasts, including The Molly of Denali Podcast (3 seasons), Odd Squadcast, Pinkalicious & Peterrific Podcast(2 seasons), The Arthur Podcast (3 seasons), and PBS KIDS’ first original podcast, Keyshawn Solves it. Podcasts have garnered 77M streams and 10M downloads across PBS KIDS podcasting platforms to date – with PBS KIDS’ newest podcast, Keyshawn Solves it, produced by GBH Kids and PRX, garnering nearly 2.2M cross-platform streams and 30K downloads in its first 4 weeks. Additional podcasts are slated to roll out throughout 2024.
All podcasts are available free on-demand on the PBS KIDS Video App and across all major podcast platforms. Following their premieres, new episodes of Jamming on the job, Playdate with the Wombats!, and The Arthur Podcast will roll out weekly.