Slovak public broadcasting continuing children's television program in Romanes and Slovak

"Tumenca khere - S vámi doma" (At Home with You) is the name of a program, the first series of which was broadcast by the Košice-based station of public broadcaster Radio and Television Slovakia (RTVS) last year. It is especially intended for Romani children as well as others. 

The program is specific in that it uses both the Romanes and Slovak languages. The public broadcaster will be continuing the program this year with a second season of 12 episodes. 

Subject matter starting with the letters "A" through "K" will be broadcast every Thursday on RTVS channel 2 (Dvojce). "This program is the only one with such a format in the world. People abroad envy us for how we have taken up the educational process through television during the pandemic," posted Michal Sivák, who performs in the program, to his blog.   

Viewers of the program will find not just common household activities being shown, but also very illustrative teaching from the studio with moderator Klaudia Oláhová and with Sivák, who is himself an educator, as well as content like a fairy tale performed by Marián Balog of the Romathan theatre company. The three moderators will be reviewing subject matter from the primary school curriculum in alphabetical order.   

Each episode features poems, songs, examples of mathematics, fairy tales and, for older children, information about various figures, either in the Romanes language with Slovak subtitles or in Slovak, according to the Slovak Journalists' Syndicate. "Regular television broadcasts in Romanes were produced back in 1993. The new situation, however, brought up the idea of benefiting children in particular. The children's program in Romanes is an innovation in the Slovak media space," said the chief editor of the Košice branch of the National Radio of RTVS, Ľuba Koľová.  

"If we are speaking about the fact that the education of Romani children has long been amiss, about their bilinguality and lack of comprehension of the Slovak language, then this show should have existed long ago. It should have been given a permanent slot in the programming, if something is supposed to change," Sivák says.

The content of the broadcasts has been prepared by Roman Sorger ( of the Táraninky children's program on RTVS), who has included the expert educational, methodological and psychological initiatives of state-sponsored educational institutions in the program. The Košice studio is producing the broadcasts in close collaboration with the State Educational Institute, the Research Institute for Child Psychology and Pathopsychology, and other expert, relevant institutions such as Haliganda, Centrum Mirabilis, the Foundation for the Children of the Slovak Republic, Romedem, Teach for Slovakia, and with children themselves.