Tag: lessons

Interview: Sesame Street

  • Elmo is surprised when he and Rosita find a baby bird as part of Sesame Street's 40th season. (Photo by Richard Termine, courtesy of Sesame Street)

Sesame Street is going green.
The children’s program will
focus on nature education during
its 40th season with the “My
World is Green and Growing”
project. Lester Graham talked
with Carol Lynn Parente.
She’s the Executive Producer
of Sesame Street:

Transcript

Sesame Street is going green.
The children’s program will
focus on nature education during
its 40th season with the “My
World is Green and Growing”
project. Lester Graham talked
with Carol Lynn Parente.
She’s the Executive Producer
of Sesame Street:

Lester: Letters, numbers, social interaction, all things we’d expect from Sesame Street. Why nature?

Parente: We learned by having our academic research advisors that by giving love and exposure to the environment was the best way to hopefully create citizens that will want to take care of it.

Lester: What kind of things will kids be able to pick up from this effort?
Parente: Well, we want to just get them out and exploring the environment and nature in general. And that can be in whatever their environment is. So nature doesn’t necessarily have to be a camping trip, although Elmo does go on one of those in our season 40, but it can be out experiencing what is in their environment, whether it be urban or rural and –

Lester: yeah, I wanted to note that. I mean, Sesame Street is an urban setting for kids whose lives are more about concrete and asphalt than flowers and grass. How will you relate to them?

Parente: Well, when you talk about noticing your environment, those environments and habitats are all around us. So, grass for a child in a suburban big wonderful meadow or field might be what their version of grass is, but there is also grass that pops up between the concrete of the sidewalks in an urban setting. And there are habits of wildlife in every environment you’re in and getting kids to understand that is part of the fun.

[Clip from Sesame Street Episode]

Lester: Some of these environmental issues are complicated, a little scary, take global warming for example. So where do you draw the line on Sesame Street?

Parente: When we talked about how the environment affects our audience, some of the messages that are common with environmental conservationist messages like “Save the Earth” and that’s a really scary concept for very young children because it implies something is wrong and something is going to happen and you don’t what that is and what needs saving. So we really stayed away from those kinds of messages. It’s really about having fun interacting with the environment and I think for our audience, that’s where we really put the focus.

[Clip from Sesame Street Episode]

Lester: So, how often in a typical show will we hear about nature and how long will this nature education effort last on Sesame Street?

Parente: It’s definitely has a presence in every single show in season 40, which is great because it’s a really thorough, um, jump into the curriculum. We’re definitely dealing with it through all of season 40 and the science part of the environment, which it really what it is, a science and nature curriculum, will extent into season 41 as well.

Lester: Carol Lynn Parente is the executive producer of Sesame Street. Have a sunny day!

Parente: Thank you, you as well!

[Clip of Theme Song]

Related Links

Teacher Brings Adventures to the Classroom

  • Fourth-grade teacher Robin Frisch-Gleason on a research trip to Antarctica (Photo courtesy of Robin Frisch-Gleason)

Kids can watch all kinds of TV shows, movies,
and DVDs about science and nature. But it’s not the
same as talking to a researcher who’s actually been
to remote places in the world. Kyle Norris reports
when that researcher is your fourth-grade teacher it
makes everything very real:

Transcript

Kids can watch all kinds of TV shows, movies,
and DVDs about science and nature. But it’s not the
same as talking to a researcher who’s actually been
to remote places in the world. Kyle Norris reports
when that researcher is your fourth-grade teacher it
makes everything very real:

Okay, so guess where we are.

“Good morning, Slausson School. Good morning.”

It’s a school assembly.

So the woman talking is Robin Frisch-Gleason. She’s a fourth grade teacher. And before
that she was a geologist. And she loves polar regions. She says she loves their vastness
and their emptiness.

A couple months ago she went to Antarctica to study the rocks. And to learn more about
how to teach kids about polar regions.

Now that’s she’s back, she does stuff like this assembly, and tells kids about her trip.
This is her explaining how geologists drill the ice and then pull-up core samples of rock.

“I explain it by saying think about putting a straw in milkshake. You put a straw down.
The very top of the milkshake is the top of the seafloor. And then you press down, maybe
to bottom of cup, and when you cover the straw with your finger and pull it back up, you
have a core of milkshake. And that’s just like we take up a core of rock.”

She says the rocks are like a book, and they tell a story about the past. The scientists in
Antarctica are actually reading the rocks. And they’re trying to find out if the ice melted
when the climate got warmer in the past. So that they can predict what will happen to the
ice as the climate continues to warm in the future.

Robin Frisch-Gleason wants to kids to know that polar regions are vulnerable to climate change.

“And they should be aware of it, and as they grow up it should influence their decisions, their
voting, their career choices, and their own personal behaviors.”

But ultimately she wants to make learning fun. And like alive. Back in her fourth-grade
classroom, the kids do a lot of hands-on activities.

(clapping)

Like imitating the way penguins communicate through penguin calls. But in this case, by
clapping their hands in a certain pattern, and trying to find other kids who have their
same pattern.

In another activity, they wear different types of insulated gloves – like a glove lined with
cotton, or a glove lined with fat – and they stick it into icy water, to see which is warmer.

“It’s fun to stick your hand in things. It’s hands-on like he said, it’s fun doing hands-on
stuff, it’s fun trying out different things. And it’s fun because you’re really trying to
experiment on stuff. You’re experimenting with science and it’s really fun at the same
time.”

Plus the kids say that it’s cool having a teacher go to Antarctica and come back and teach
everybody all these cool things. They say it’s even given them some street-cred amongst other kids at
other schools.

Here’s 4th grader Cole Magoon:

“And it’s kind of like have a famous person be your teacher.”

The kids say that doing fun, hands-on activities actually makes them want to pay more
attention. And this kind of learning not only sparks their critical thinking and problem-
solving skills, but it’s also a great way to get kids psyched about science and math. And
learning from a person who’s actually been in the field seems to amplify all this.

And it gets kids thinking about the world they live in, and the world they’ll have to take
care of.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Capturing Chippewa History

New technology is being used to expose students in the
Great Lakes states to the history and ways of the six Chippewa
tribes of the Lake Superior region. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Mike Simonson reports … the C-D ROM, created with the help from tribal
leaders, has been six years in the making:

Science Center Brings Lessons Home

In school when kids learn about the environment… they often learn
about the devastation of the rain forests in South America; they learn
about lemurs in Madagascar…. and about the melting of the polar ice
caps. They don’t often learn about the environment in their own
hometowns. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports…
some school children are getting a chance to learn about the environment
around them and what they can do to protect it:

Fishing Lessons

Learning how to fish isn’t hard, but if you don’t have someone to show you how…chances are, it’ll take a lot of trial and error before you learn the subtle nuances of the sport…like how to bait a hook so the fish can’t steal all your worms.For most of us, these fishing lessons were informal, taught by parents or older brothers and sisters. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson found out, this summer, the state of Michigan is helping people get into the act: