PBS Kids Writers Contest facts for kids
The PBS Kids Writers Contest is a yearly competition for young writers and artists in the United States. It's open to students from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. This contest encourages kids to write and illustrate their own stories. It started in 1995 as the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest and was relaunched in 2009 with its current name.
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How the Contest Began
The first contest began in 1995. It was created by the people behind the popular children's TV show, Reading Rainbow. The idea was to help kids love reading and writing even more. The contest asked children to write and draw their own picture books. Kids would send their stories to their local TV stations. These local stations would pick winners, and then those winners would go on to a national competition.
The contest quickly became very popular. After just a few years, almost 40,000 stories were sent in from all over the country. The number of kids joining kept growing. In 2007, the contest reached its highest point with more than 50,000 entries!
Changes and New Beginnings
Around 2006, the Reading Rainbow TV show started having money problems. This made the future of the contest unclear. Because of these funding issues, the national part of the competition was canceled in 2006. However, many local public broadcasting stations still held their own contests.
Even without new Reading Rainbow episodes, more kids wanted to join the contest in 2007. So, the WNED-TV station in Buffalo, New York, which helped create Reading Rainbow, decided to take over. They brought back the national competition in 2007. The Reading Rainbow TV show stopped airing reruns on August 28, 2009. But the writing contest was still very popular, with 90 stations taking part. PBS decided to keep the winning stories available online until December 2009.
A New Name for the Contest
In November 2009, PBS teamed up with WNED-TV again. They decided to bring back the contest in the same way as before, but with a new name: the PBS Kids Go! Writers Contest. They also made a new website for the contest. This website shared updated information and kept an archive of all the winning stories. In 2014, the name changed one more time to the PBS Kids Writers Contest. This happened after the PBS Kids Go! brand was no longer used.
How Kids Can Join
Children in kindergarten through third grade can enter the contest. They need to live in an area where a local PBS station takes part. Stories can be real or made-up, and they can be prose (like a regular story) or poetry. Each story must be written by one child.
Story Length Guidelines
- For kindergarten and first grade, stories should have between 50 and 200 words. They also need illustrations.
- For second and third grade, stories should have between 100 and 350 words. These also need illustrations.
Each local PBS station judges the stories by grade level. The first-place winners from each local station then get sent to the national contest later in the year.
See also
- Lune Spark Young Writers' Short Story Contest
- National Kids-in-Print Book Contest for Students
- National Novel Writing Month
- Three-Day Novel Contest
