Rosemarie T. Truglio - Sesame Street--Ready for School!: A Parents Guide to Playful Learning for Children Ages 2 to 5

S esame Street, the longest, safest, and most interesting street on the planet, opened for foot traffic fifty years ago. Because of regular repair and upgrade, it continues to delight, intrigue, and educate preschool children and their parents today. A survivor from the late 1960sa time of chaos, opportunity, creativity, and Great Society promisesthis now-iconic television show embodies a promise kept. And what was that promise? To give young children the support and skills they need when they are very young so they will thrive intellectually and socially in school and beyond, with an appetite for learning, competence, and enough curiosity to last a lifetime.

As a former board member for Sesame Workshop, I had the opportunity (of a lifetime) to know many of Sesame Streets creators, critics, artists, musicians, writers, educators, researchers, producers, and puppeteers. Over time, I began to understand that their approach to preschool programming is a unique recipe indeed. That recipe is a pot full of delicious and nutritious, fun and spicy ingredients, about which young kids care deeply: relationships, security, play, language, food, making stuff, making stuff up, loss, animals, numbers, feelings good and badthe whole human experience. Working from a research base, Sesame Streets content combines humor, surprise, and clever adult hooks to entertain tapped-out parents, while great music and engaging dialogue between characters (both puppet and human) encourage young minds to explore beyond what they already know.

These same qualities run cover to cover through Ready for School! For those who know Sesame Street well, this book will feel very familiar: no preachy or clichd advice, just the stuff that matters. Expertly guided by Rosemarie Truglio, Senior Vice President of Curriculum and Content, this book will make you feel like the authors almost know you and your child. Dr. Truglio and her Sesame Workshop colleagues have been at their work for many years, and it shows.

This book couldnt have come at a better time. Most of the parents I know these days, regardless of economic or educational security, are hungry for meaningful, relevant suggestions about how to do the best they can for their children, despite being crazy-busy and worried about how to keep their kids happily and safely engaged with the world around them. In my decades of working with families, I have found no more savvy travel guide than Sesame Street.

Ready for School! covers all the subjects that make up Sesame Workshops Whole Child Curriculum, offered as accessible text along with lots of quick and easy extras, like Oops and Ahas (personal parenting moments that illustrate how we all learn when making mistakes) and Play & Learn (suggestions for playful learning experiences parents and children can share). My favorites? As a child psychiatrist, I went first to How Many Blocks All Together? on my nightstand when we were raising our first.

And I love the charts! They are like those quick reference guides that come with complex electronics. In each chapter, the charts highlight the important stuff you want to understand about where your kids are on the scale of developmental learning, andmore importantabout what comes next, without the anxiety-provoking emphasis on when it comes.

Woven throughout this book are Sesame Streets signature guidelines for helping children and their parents face the big and little issues in their lives with courage and respect. Over the years, Sesame Street has helped kids deal with everything from homelessness to Mr. Hoopers death, being bullied, racism, and natural disasters. Real-life experience as well as research tells us that Sesame Street has helped explain these issues to preschoolers time and time again. Often, parents feel helpless when facing some of the bewildering events that shape our lives and our communities. Ready for School! is informed by the tradition of finding a way to help kids and those who love them understand they are not alone, that they have the stuff in them to figure it out, and help is never too far away, even when thingsfor noware bad, scary, or beyond understanding.

The other signature Sesame Street touch, obvious from the first pages of Ready for School!, is the ability to instill a sense of delight and playfulness into the learning process of being ready to learn in school. The repetitive, rote drudge of so many flash-card learning approaches is nowhere to be found in this book. Sesame Street has known for fifty years that such approaches dont work for learning that endures. Instead, Ready for School! encourages even the most reluctant I-dont-know-how-to-play parent to use bits of guided play with preschoolers to build skills and self-regard, which ultimately culminate in precious I DID IT! moments.

The creators of Sesame Streetand Ready for School!clearly understand that raising a preschooler, physically and emotionally, is an exhausting, never-ending, 24/7 commitment. They know that even when you are not with them, your children are in your minds or not far from it. They respect what youre trying to give to your family, what youre up against in doing it, and that raising kids is a lifelong adventure.

This empathic tone for parents challenges pervades Ready for School! Mothers and fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings and other extended family members, partners and other caregivers were all in the minds of the writers as they created the content for this gem of a book. You will appreciate having this guidebook to playful learning nearby as you proceed on your singular child-raising journey. Indeed, the iconic question How do you get to