Sesame Street first hit screens in 1969 and children’s television was forever changed. For over 50 years the colorful community of Muppets has touched the hearts of children all over the world.
The Sesame Street children’s television series was created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett and is produced by Sesame Workshop and features a combination of live-action, animation and puppetry.
Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Grover, Abby Cadabby, Bert, Ernie and the growing list of characters have entertained and educated preschool children, as they prepare young children for school.
Sesame Workshop’s mission is to help kids everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. The creators of Sesame Street understood that children tend to imitate what they watch of television and through the program’s characters demonstrated positive behaviours of inquisitiveness and the enjoyment of learning using repetition and humour.
For children that enjoy watching Big Bird, Elmo, Abby Cadabby and friends, you can encourage children’s learning and development with Sesame Street themed educational toys as they will relate to the characters and evoke emotion with their familiarity to them.
Soft Toys
Stuffed animals and soft toys are cute and cuddly, but is there really any educational value to your child’s development and well being? Babies learn about the world around them through their senses, one important sense being the sensation of touch. The soft fur, embroidered features and costumes worn by the muppet characters offer many different textures. Consequently, these textures to stimulate their senses and assist in development.
As babies grow into toddlers, plush soft toys of the Sesame Street characters can help children learn and recognise familiar words, like the names of the characters ‘Elmo’, ‘Big Bird’ and ‘Cookie Monster’ and identify and learn colors, like the colour of their fur and describe the character’s personalities. Stuffed toys can become constant companions for children. A stuffed toy offers emotional support whereby behaviors and experiences can be joined with their cuddly friends and mimicked to overcome challenging situations and comfort them, like bedtime and feeding routines.
As children grow toys are thrown about, dragged, hugged, kissed and cuddled. As pre-schoolers, children engage in more imaginative play. Children can re-enact a skit they’ve watched from an episode of Sesame Street or any event they imagine and develop their own story and have elaborate conversations with their toys, where toys may experience everything a child experiences.
Electronic Toys
Good quality electronic toys and gadgets do more than entertain too. With sounds, colours and interactive buttons, an electronic toy can make learning fun, especially those that feature Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster, Julia, Grover, Oscar the Grouch and more of the characters on Sesame Street that children bond with.
Music and sounds stimulate brain activity. Toys that play tunes, songs and talking toys boost cognitive development in children. Studies have shown that babies and toddlers that are exposed to music, tend to have more advanced skills in learning, critical and logical thinking and problem solving skills than their peers. A Sesame Street toy that talks, sings or plays music can also enhance memory and develop language skills. Through the repetition of music and phrases, children remember the words and improve memory storage and processing.
Interactive electronic toys can teach children important skills such as learning colours, numbers, word recognition and phonics. Toys designed with the muppets from Sesame Street have easily recognisable faces, sounds and music that make learning familiar and lots of fun for children.
