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Winnie magazine introduces a new format!

Aimed at children aged 3-5, Winnie magazine is updating its content to provide gentle but effective child-development support for the nursery-school years, the period when toddlers first divide their time between home and school. Though they still need to share times of emotional closeness with their parents, during this phase of life children also have their first outside learning experiences.

Winnie’s new format provides a transition between the world of toddlers, where the focus is on early development, and the world of older children, where discovery and vocabulary-building are key.

A magazine designed for sharing tender moments and building self-reliance

Each month, Winnie’s new format includes a 10-page tale whose subject matter and format make it the ideal bedtime story. Together with their parents, children explore typical, everyday situations (involving friendship, holidays, sadness and more) transposed to the animal world, or stories that carry them away to fantasy worlds filled with fairies, witches, kings and queens. Children can later “read” the stories on their own by simply looking at the pictures, helping them develop a sense of autonomy and independence with regard to reading and giving them and their parents a real feeling of achievement. Winnie is a gentle, warm-hearted character who carries young readers into his world via a four-page story, one that children can understand on their own through the pictures or that adults can read from the text aloud for more detail. There is also an illustrated strip story – featuring the adventures of Mini Loup, a mischievous little wolf brimming with ideas – that is also designed to develop autonomous reading skills in children by means of striking visual gags. And through a new feature, the mini-Winnie photo strip, young readers can explore the characters of Winnie and his friends in an all-photo story with characters superimposed on a background – a three-page spread that plunges young readers headlong into a daily adventure.

Winnie takes reader needs to heart

Some 72% of children aged 3-5 (1.7 million in France) read children’s magazines, and 69% of them read a magazine several times weekly. For 85% of readers in this age bracket, reading time is shared with parents or another adult, since the majority (72%) prefer to read in the evening just before bedtime.*

An interactive magazine for the early learning years

Since the years between ages 3 and 5 are when children begin to ask their first questions, the 2009 version of Winnie is also more interactive. Three “Discovery” pages portray a different world in each issue – a fireman with his truck, an astronaut on the moon, or a nomad in the desert, for example. This encourages children to explore and acquire specialized vocabulary while they play dress-up by putting the characters in their appropriate costumes using movable stickers.

Reassuring Disney characters (like Mickey, Donald, Lilo and Stitch) accompany young readers in “Discovering English” by focusing on specific themes – the park, the kitchen, the street and so on. Youngsters use a picture album to play with English words and their translations using movable stickers. An interactive double-page layout is devoted to the world of “Animals,” giving children the chance to practice knowledge they have just acquired in a fun way by making an ID card for the animal using stickers and answering multiple-choice questions.

The magazine with fun ways to develop thought processes and reasoning

Winnie features two interactive observation-based games that invite children to immerse themselves in two different worlds – one firmly anchored in everyday life (populated by animals and humans) and the other a dreamlike world full of fairies, witches and monsters.

Activities involving reasoning, comparison and identification skills encourage children to read carefully on their own. For example, four items – such as an animal, a soother, a technological object, a toy, a monkey, a bear, a rocket or a scooter – will recur on certain pages to provide a hunt-and-find activity. There is also a colouring section that children can cut out as a keepsake or offer to someone as a gift. Each month, young readers will find a comic strip with character outlines for colouring-in superimposed on a photographed background. And in order to help children develop their memory, each issue of Winnie magazine features a nursery rhyme or traditional poem to explore and learn by heart.

To stimulate children’s interest in music, a free mini-piano is included with the debut new-format issue.

Release date: 3 June 2009

Publication frequency: monthly
Readership: Girls and boys aged 3-5
Paid circulation in France: 101,004 copies (OJD 2008 survey)