Sesame Street’s Tips for Families at Home — Teach Kids a Superpower, Mealtime Math, and Fun Ways to Get Moving
Week #4 — April 13, 2020
Rosemarie Truglio, PhD. Senior Vice President, Curriculum & Content, Sesame Workshop.
As our “for now” normal becomes more routine, Sesame Workshop is here to support children and families with ideas for fun learning experiences you can create together at home. This week, we bring you three “Play & Learn” activities to help children manage their emotions and build resilience, learn math and science concepts in the kitchen, and get some healthy exercise. And after viewing Sesame Street segments on PBSKids and HBO, we have some related “Watch and Learn” strategies to help extend the learning beyond the screen.
Play & Learn Activities
Stoplight Game (Managing Emotions with the Power of Yet)
When children learn new skills or solve problems, they often get frustrated and may even “give up” when faced with obstacles, mistakes, or failure. But you can help them build an important skill — resilience — by helping them to understand that it’s okay to make mistakes. Not only are mistakes okay, we can learn a lot from them! And when you encourage your child to keep trying and help her to see that, with practice, she will succeed, you’re teaching her a superpower skill: the “power of yet.” Our friends Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars dropped by Sesame Street to help Elmo, Cookie Monster, Abby Cadabby, and friends learn the same important lesson in an upbeat, musical way — why not dance along?
The Stoplight Game is a useful strategy for when your child gets frustrated facing obstacles or failure — and a great way to instill the “power of yet.” Make red, yellow, and green “lights” with construction paper, or have your child color in circles on white paper. Talk about what each color signifies, then use your homemade lights to signal what to do in different situations.
- Red light: Stop and encourage your child to belly-breathe in order to calm down a “big feeling”
- Yellow Light: Pause and make a plan. Once calm, help your child understand what the problem is and think about other ways it can be solved
- Green light: Go ahead and give it a try. If it doesn’t work, go back to Yellow and figure out what else might work
Kitchen Helper (Math is More than Numbers)
Check out Cookie Monster’s new “Snack Chat” video and watch him make a fruit smoothie.
Enlisting your child to help prepare snacks and meals not only builds self-esteem and self-confidence, but math skills, too. As you cook, bake, or prepare snacks together, talk about how you are following the directions of the recipes and that you’re doing lots of math as you:
- Use numbers to measure and weigh ingredients
- Find different shapes together all around the kitchen, from plate circles to baking sheet rectangles to placemat squares
- Talk about relational concepts such as big vs. small; small, medium, and large; or big, bigger, and biggest as you choose different-sized bowls and pans. Ingredients and cupboards can be open or closed, and you can teach fast and slow as you mix and blend
- Highlight spatial relations language as you use low or high heat, place items on either the top or bottom oven rack, flip over pancakes or rotate your quiche to cook evenly
Learning bonus: there’s a lot of science going on, too. Your child can see how mixing ingredients together forms a whole new substance and that liquids change into solids with the heat of an oven or the colder temperature of the freezer.
Healthy habits bonus: when children help in the kitchen, they’re more open to trying new and nutritious foods: because they were involved in its preparation, they are naturally curious how it tastes. Try these recipes with your child and talk about how healthy foods keep you strong and give lots of energy to play and learn.
Move & Groove — (Make Time for Healthy Exercise)
When Grover moves around his home to show the difference between near and far, not only is he getting some exercise, he’s also teaching a spatial relation concept. You can help your child learn, move, and have fun all at the same time!
Create an obstacle course either inside or in your backyard, then ask your child to listen to the directions and perform the following spatial relation action words:
- Crawl under the table
- Run around the chair
- Jump over the cushion or rope
- Skip between the pillows or trees/plants
Go on a scavenger hunt. As you play this game, hide items around your home and use spatial relational words to give hints: next to, above, below, in between, under, over. Have your children also hide items and practice using math language to give you hints.
Watch & Learn Activities
- In Sesame Street: Math Magic, Max the Magician amazes Rosita, Big Bird, and Elmo with his magical, mathematical tricks of addition, subtraction, and division.
Extend the learning!
- Sing songs that include a number, such as “Five Little Monkeys” or “Five Little Ducks That I Once Knew.” Use corresponding fingers to teach subtraction as you take away each monkey or duck while you sing together.
- Play Big Bird’s Basketball game to practice recognizing numbers and counting.
2. In Sesame Street: Elmo the Engineer, Elmo and his dad become engineers as they design a “toy putter-awayer” to help Elmo put away his toys.
Extend the learning! You and your child can design a toy “putter-awayer” or “picker-upper” with things you find around the house. Try attaching sticky tape to a paper towel roll for your child to use to put their smaller toys away. Have fun!
These are stressful days for families everywhere, and Sesame Workshop is here to help. With 50 years’ experience in early childhood education and in helping children and their caregivers face challenging times, we’ve created an online hub of resources that parents can use at home to spark playful learning, offer children comfort, and focus a bit on self-care, too. Each week, as we roll out new content, a Sesame Workshop early childhood development expert will contribute a column here with strategies to help families find ways to breathe, laugh, and play together.
