‘Sesame Street’ Interacts With Child Care

“Sesame Street,” the venerable 23-year-old “edutainment” pioneer, isn’t resting on its laurels. In response to the increasing numbers of children in day care, the Children’s Television Workshop has launched an ambitious program to teach child-care providers how to use the show as an interactive educational tool.

Called the “Sesame Street PEP Initiative”--PEP stands for “Preschool Educational Program”--the national project is in its research phase, involving 27 public television stations and serving thousands of children.

“We found our audience has changed,” said Jim Vidakovich, CTW consultant in charge of West Coast operations. “They’re not at home to a large degree because 60% of women are in the work force. By the year 2000, it will be about 80%. What we don’t want to have happen is ‘Here’s “Sesame Street.” Now sit down, watch it and be quiet.’

“We want them to be involved, to talk over the television, to use it as a vehicle for asking questions.”

Vidakovich and fellow field representative Ollye B. Shirley conducted a PEP training session Saturday at television station KCET in Hollywood. More than three-dozen child-care providers recruited by Crystal Stairs, a child-care consultant company, alternately took the role of child, then teacher, learning by doing.

They participated in art, reading, music and movement activities, each related to “Sesame Street” segments shown periodically throughout the free five-hour workshop, and were taken through comprehensive written material.

Natalie Navarrete, president of the Family Child Care Counsel in the San Fernando Valley, said she appreciated learning “all the little shortcuts to have the children join in more often.”

Judy Ravitz, director of Community Outreach at KCET, describes PEP as a “multi-year project. For the first year and a half we’ll be working with the day-care and home-care provider as our target, and then we’ll be branching out to parent groups as well.”

The program, inspired by Texas industrialist Ralph B. Rogers, began as a pilot project in Dallas in 1990, before being launched nationwide in the fall of 1991 as a collaboration between CTW, local public television stations and community child-care providers. “Over the coming year and a half,” said Pam Green, vice president of CTW’s Community Education Services, “we hope to involve about 150 stations.”

CTW supplies each station with a “$10,000 start-up grant,” Green said, and the stations provide additional funding to purchase materials and a handbook of activities and reading lists created by CTW to fit the curriculum of individual “Sesame Street” shows.

“We have a show that has now become an institution,” Vidakovich said. “It is well respected and it is a part of television. It would be a misnomer to say that it is a cure-all, but it does have the power to educate. And the way it has the power to educate is in teaching people how to use television.”