''Picture Pages'' was a 1978–1984 American educational television program aimed at

preschool A preschool (sometimes spelled as pre school or pre-school), also known as nursery school, pre-primary school, play school, is an school, educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children before they ...

children, presented by

Bill Cosby William Henry Cosby Jr. ( ; born July 12, 1937) is an American retired comedian, actor, and media personality. Often cited as a trailblazer for African Americans in the entertainment industry, Cosby was a film, television, and stand-up comedy ...

—teaching lessons on basic

arithmetic Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics that deals with numerical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In a wider sense, it also includes exponentiation, extraction of roots, and taking logarithms. ...

geometry Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

, word association and drawing through a series of interactive lessons that used a workbook that viewers would follow along with the lesson. ''Picture Pages'' was created by Julius Oleinick and started on a local

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and its county seat. It is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, second-most populous city in Pennsylvania (after Philadelphia) and the List of Un ...

children's show in 1974 with the ''Picture Pages'' puzzle booklets given away at a

supermarket A supermarket is a self-service Retail#Types of outlets, shop offering a wide variety of food, Drink, beverages and Household goods, household products, organized into sections. Strictly speaking, a supermarket is larger and has a wider selecti ...

chain. It debuted as a national segment of the ''

Captain Kangaroo ''Captain Kangaroo'' is an American children's television series that aired weekday mornings on the American television network CBS for 29 years, from 1955 to 1984, making it the longest-running nationally broadcast children's television program ...

'' show in 1978 (then directed by Jimmy Hirschfeld), in which Captain Kangaroo would do the lessons on his "magic drawing board".

took over hosting the segments in 1980, presenting the lessons with a marker named "Mortimer Ichabod Marker" (M.I. for short), which was topped with a cartoon figure that played musical notes whenever he drew with it. When the ''Captain Kangaroo'' show left CBS in 1984, the Cosby-era ''Picture Pages'' series was rerun as an interstitial program on

Nickelodeon Nickelodeon (nicknamed Nick) is an American pay television channel and the flagship property of the Nickelodeon Group, a sub-division of the Paramount Media Networks division of Paramount Global. Launched on April 1, 1979, as the first ca ...

from 1984 to 1993. The show also aired in Canada on the YTV cable network.

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, id=0267206 1970s American children's television series 1970s preschool education television series 1974 American television series debuts 1980s American children's television series 1980s preschool education television series 1984 American television series endings American preschool education television series Television shows filmed in Pittsburgh