Category Archives: Uncategorized

Apply to the… Youth Design Team Calling all high schoolers! Join the Youth Design Team to help shape the future of games, apps, and websites for young people around the world. Apply to join the Team if you want to…   Make a difference. We want games, websites, media, and apps to be better for kids and teens. And we need your help! Learn new skills. Join online workshops with professional designers to share your ideas and insights about what…

Since the pandemic began, we’ve witnessed unprecedented changes in how we work and live, changes that have had a tremendous influence on the early childhood space. We’ve seen a country at war with an unrelenting virus, tremendous economic hardship, an overdue reckoning with racism and discrimination; we’ve seen the disruption of child care services and school, and we’ve seen so much of what we had taken for granted become much more difficult and time-consuming. We’ve also seen tremendous room for…

The new documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street is here! Chronicling the first 20 years of the show, the filmmakers interweave archival footage and interviews with the original creators and cast of Sesame Street (including our founder Joan Ganz Cooney). The film features clips from the show’s early days, evoking a sense of nostalgia for those of us who grew up watching the show. But it also highlights how the show’s original mission remains as relevant as…

As a result of COVID-19, families around the world are struggling to adjust, adapt, and keep each other safe. In response, Sesame Workshop is launching the Caring for Each Other initiative – a commitment to supporting families for the duration of this crisis. Through this initiative, we will be introducing brand new content from Sesame Street and Streets around the world, as well as an online hub at SesameStreet.org/caring offering a rich array of free resources to support children and families.   On Sesame Street, we will be creating video messages of love and kindness, activities and virtual play dates featuring the Sesame Street Muppets (launching soon). Families can also now watch full episodes on…

With Sesame Street: Ready for School! A Parent’s Guide to Playful Learning for Children Ages 2 to 5, Dr. Rosemarie Truglio shares the research-based, curriculum-directed school readiness skills that have made Sesame Street the preeminent children’s television program for the past 50 years. The book features eight chapters on key areas of learning and child development, including language, literacy, math, science, logic & reasoning, social & emotional development, healthy habits, and the arts, and offers hands-on activities to help parents incorporate playful…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is thrilled to present a newly reformatted version of Sesame Street co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney’s still-relevant 1966 report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education made a convincing case for the power of television to prepare children, particularly in underserved communities, to succeed in kindergarten—and led directly to the program that revolutionized children’s media. We have reformatted the original photocopied report because we know today’s researchers, educators,…

Do you use immersive media like AR or VR with students in 1st through 8th grade? Are you interested, but haven’t been able to try it out yet? Or are these technologies not for you? The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop would like to know more about teachers’ decisions whether or not and how to use immersive media with their students. Please take this survey—and share it with all the teachers you know—to help us gain a better…

Happy New Year! We hope that you have enjoyed a wonderful holiday season with loved ones, and that you are as rested and ready to take on new opportunities and challenges in 2019 as we are! As we begin the new year, we wanted to take some time to reflect on 2018. The Cooney Center team would like to to thank all of you—the producers, researchers, policymakers, educators, technologists, parents—who are guiding today’s children as they grow into tomorrow’s smarter,…

Opening minds to new ways of thinking about STEM for young children Researchers who study children often point out that teaching science and math in the early years is also a great way to support children’s literacy skills. But teachers and administrators lament that it is not so easy to integrate these subjects in day-to-day classrooms. It doesn’t help that the very concepts of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) can get short shrift in pre-K, kindergarten, and the early…

The “Endless” apps by Originator (Endless Alphabet, Endless Numbers, etc.) all follow a reliable and effective formula: genuinely funny antics + solid educational content = learning that sticks.  Most of their apps feature a lovable and irreverent cast of cute monsters who help to illustrate the definition of words, the meanings of sentences and the value of numbers through silly animations.  I was pleased to be able to interview Originator founder Rex Ishibashi in this most recent episode of the App Fairy to…