This article is about the US educational television segment. For information on the British television programme, see Picture Page

Picture Page

Picture Page is a British television programme, broadcast on the BBC Television Service from 1936 to 1939, and again after the service's hiatus during the Second World War from 1946 until 1952...

.

"Picture Pages" is an educational television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 segment aimed at preschool children, teaching lessons on basic arithmetic

Arithmetic

Arithmetic or arithmetics is the oldest and most elementary branch of mathematics, used by almost everyone, for tasks ranging from simple day-to-day counting to advanced science and business calculations. It involves the study of quantity, especially as the result of combining numbers...

, geometry

Geometry

Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....

, and drawing through a series of interactive lessons that used a workbook that viewers would follow along with the lesson.

"Picture Pages" started on a local Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

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

Supermarket

A supermarket, a form of grocery store, is a self-service store offering a wide variety of food and household merchandise, organized into departments...

 chain. It debuted as a national segment of the Captain Kangaroo

Captain Kangaroo

Captain Kangaroo is a children's television series which aired weekday mornings on the American television network CBS for nearly 30 years, from October 3, 1955 until December 8, 1984, making it the longest-running children's television program of its day...

 show in 1978, in which Captain Kangaroo would do the lessons on his "magic drawing board". Later, the segments were taken over by Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby

William Henry "Bill" Cosby, Jr. is an American comedian, actor, author, television producer, educator, musician and activist. A veteran stand-up performer, he got his start at various clubs, then landed a starring role in the 1960s action show, I Spy. He later starred in his own series, the...

 and the lessons were used with his marker named "Mortimer Ichabod Marker" (or "MI", for short).

When the Captain Kangaroo show left CBS

CBS

CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...

 in 1984, the segment was adopted as part of Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon (TV channel)

Nickelodeon, often simply called Nick and originally named Pinwheel, is an American children's channel owned by MTV Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom International. The channel is primarily aimed at children ages 7–17, with the exception of their weekday morning program block aimed at preschoolers...

's Pinwheel program until that show was canceled in 1989. The segment was also used as an interstitial program

Interstitial program

In television programming, an interstitial program refers to a short program which is often shown between movies or other events, e.g. a cast interview after movies on premium channels...

 into the early 1990s.

The show also aired on Canada's YTV cable network.