Parents' Guide to Tickety Toc

Plenty of preschool series have embraced the task of blending content that appeals to kids with pre-reading skills like letter sounds, shapes, and counting. Tickety Toc tackles a different subject entirely, introducing tots to the concept of time. Tommy and Tallulah live a carefree life behind the closed doors of their clock, but their adventures are limited by their hourly responsibilities as the clock's chimers. In seeing how the characters adapt to these guidelines, kids can relate the experiences to their own schedules and responsibilities for school, playtime, mealtime, and bedtime and start to see patterns in how they spend blocks of time in their own lives.

Of course, this is all well and good for parents, but the selling point for kids will be the show's delightful animation and colorful, comical community of characters. A master chef who just happens to be a cow, a weather-obsessed chicken, and a quirky inventor whose prototypes are prone to minor glitches make for some unpredictable situations that are sure to have tots counting the minutes until the next episode. The animation also does a good job of carrying the clock theme through every scene, incorporating gears and pendulums into background scenery and the characters themselves in creative ways that kids will love.