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Play with Me Sesame, a half-hour interactive series, brings children on a playdate with some of their favorite Sesame Street characters: Bert, Ernie, Grover and Prairie Dawn. Each episode mixes classic Sesame Street footage with newly created games and activities where the Muppets invite children to join in. Play With Me Sesame extends Sesame Street’s time-tested educational mission through opportunities for active learning. The participatory design encourages preschoolers to express themselves creatively, while the games and activities support such cornerstone cognitive concepts as same and different. As an interactive experience, the program helps children cultivate skills and attitudes needed to succeed in the social environment of school.

Noggin's PLAY WITH ME SESAME provides preschoolers with opportunities for active learning, on air and online, based on Sesame Street content. As an interactive initiative, PLAY WITH ME SESAME focuses on three primary learning goals:

1. To help preschoolers understand the fundamental concepts of similarity and difference.
2. To encourage and help enable preschoolers to engage in interactive play with other children.
3. To support creativity and individual expression

Educational Approach

PLAY WITH ME SESAME invites preschoolers to interact with familiar Sesame Street characters. In the program’s "playdate" format, viewers are encouraged--for example--to dance with Grover and help Bert solve problems in a matching game. As preschoolers join in the play, they are invited to name objects and activities; to spot connections, similarities and differences; and to recognize sequences. The Sesame Street Muppet hosts encourage viewers to voice their discoveries out loud. The Muppets then offer supportive feedback. Between activities, short films and animations provide further examples to help put new knowledge into context.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME Online offers additional opportunities to interact with the characters, create and display art work.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME responds to a wide range of learning styles, preferences and abilities. Its games-based approach is particularly appropriate in helping preschoolers enhance their understanding of similarity and difference. Not only are the concepts of same and different rich in interactive possibilities (they are at the heart of time-tested Sesame Street game formats), but they are cornerstone concepts—the bases of cognitive understandings essential to school success.

Interactive play with other children is the vehicle for much of the learning that occurs during early childhood—in cognitive as well as emotional and physical domains. Social interaction in early childhood provides intrinsic reward while enabling children to develop interpersonal strategies and cooperative attitudes that will form the foundation for later social development. As children move on to the formal setting of school, the skills and attitudes called upon in interactive play also support successful participation in school life.

Finally, PLAY WITH ME SESAME encourages creativity and individual expression. From this standpoint, the program helps prepare preschoolers to take on the challenges of self- and other-directed independent behavior—so large a part of experience throughout a child’s later life. At the same time, the program supports engagement in teamwork, an important creative approach and learning disposition.

Learning Goals:

To help preschoolers understand the fundamental concepts of similarity and difference.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME supports children’s recognition of similarity and difference in a broad range of attributes and phenomena, including:

• Size
• Shape
• Color
• Action
• Sounds
• Speed
• Emotions
• Seasons
• Function/utility

PLAY WITH ME SESAME provides opportunities to practice cognitive skills based on awareness of similarity and difference, including:

• Observing similarities and differences
• Developing vocabulary
• Matching
• Sorting
• Recognizing patterns To encourage and help enable preschoolers to engage in interactive play.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME supports cognitive, social and emotional skills involved in interactive play, including:

• Listening
• Choosing an appropriate response from a variety of behavioral alternatives, such as moving, speaking, and singing.
• Sharing
• Taking turns
• Cooperating
• Identifying and naming emotions

PLAY WITH ME SESAME models and encourages awarenesses, attitudes and vocabulary involved in interactive play, including:

• Respect for the perspective and creative output of others.
• Diverse, situationally appropriate reactions and approaches to challenge.
• Empathy and caring about the needs and feelings of others.
• Terms such as "share," "help", and "take turns"
• Support for creativity and individual expression.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME encourages creativity as an end in itself, by providing opportunities for:

• Creating art work
• Dancing
• Singing
• Creating new variations on movement and song
• By displaying children’s creative work on air and online

PLAY WITH ME SESAME encourages the use of creativity to express emotions through such outlets as dance, art and song.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME supports creativity in thinking by modeling and providing opportunities to find novel applications of the concepts same and different.

PLAY WITH ME SESAME encourages creativity in a social context by:

• modeling teamwork as a creative tool.
• modeling creative responses to social challenges.
• inviting viewers to find creative ways to address novel social situations.

PIGEON PATTERNS

Learning goals:

• Recognizing a sequence
• Color recognition
• Same and different
• Critical thinking

PERFECT PAIR

Learning goals:

• Matching like objects
• Size recognition
• Color recognition
• Sorting
• Visual discrimination
• Same and different
• Critical thinking

WHAT’S DIFFERENT

Learning goals:

• Visual discrimination
• Same and different
• Critical thinking

OATMEAL ART

Learning goal:

• Creative expression

MOVE & GROOVE WITH GROVER

Learning goal:

• Creative movement