Now of course you’ve gotta remember Sesame Street. Before Elmo’s plan for world domination Sesame Street was an educational program, and jokes aside it still is. What I never knew as a kid, and honestly wouldn’t have cared about if I did know, was that SS was designed as a tool to help young children learn – here’s a bit from wikipedia…
Sesame Street uses combinations of animation, puppets, and live actors to stimulate young children’s minds, improve their letter and word recognition, basic arithmetic, geometric forms, classification, simple problem solving, and socialization by showing children or people in their everyday lives. Since the show’s inception, other instructional goals have been basic life skills, such as how to cross the street safely, proper hygiene, healthy eating habits, and social skills; in addition, real-world situations are taught, such as death, divorce, pregnancy and birth, adoption, and even all of the human emotions such as happiness, love, anger and hatred.
One of the non-native English speaking mummies in my playgroup had a SS book and wanted to know the name of one of the monsters as she couldn’t find it herself. (I haven’t been able to find his name either though) so I went looking on-line for SS monsters and came across the Seasame Street Web-site made by PBS. As you may or may not know we try to stick to the W.H.O. recommendation of no TV until 2, so I wasn’t really interested in watching any segments but I found if I move the mouse over the faces at the bottom it’s like a xylophone and then I looked around the site and found quite a few little games and riddles, rhymes and songs that bubba boy could enjoy and of course its all another way to expose him to English. And really what else should I have expected from the founders of Educational TV.
So go on over to the web-page roll your mouse around the screen and see what fun you can have. Once you have exhausted every once of entertainment out of the first page check out the rest. I especially like this one, which is a rhyming game with Elmo.
After my PC died and I lost all my bookmarks (one of the reasons for collecting everything here in this blog) I also found that there was another Sesame Street web-site, at the moment it’s listed as a beta so maybe it’s the test for leaving the PBS domain. Anyway they have different games and a slightly different set-up. The front page isn’t as interactive but there are many different things for kids and adults to check out.
But just remember educational TV is better than just watching anything on the box but nothing is as educational to your child as your time together. Check out some studies on TV watching.
