The National Children’s Museum (NCM) will work in partnership with Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, to provide the nonprofit with a permanent place in the museum to extend the Workshop’s educational mission. The National Children’s Museum will provide Sesame Workshop a permanent museum home in the nation’s capital extending the Workshop’s educational mission. As part of the partnership, Sesame Street, and its characters, through interactive exhibits, educational video segments and books, will be integrated into elements of the Museum’s Early Learners gallery and incorporated in select Museum events and programming. Additionally, Sesame Workshop will collaborate with NCM on content development, exhibits, and program creation for the Museum’s Our World gallery, which will focus on diverse cultures and places around the globe.

The National Children’s Museum will open in 2013 at National Harbor, Md.

Sesame Workshop and Callaway Digital Arts, interactive publisher of children’s and lifestyle apps for the iPad, announced that “The Monster at the End of This Book” for iPad is now available in Apple’s App Store. This is the first Sesame Street app designed specifically for iPad. Based on the 1971 book, the app is narrated by the Sesame Street character Grover and highlights words to help build beginning reading skills. The app also features tips for parents.

Mercy Corps and Sesame Workshop have formed a partnership to bring engaging, educational programming to Haiti’s children. Sesame Workshop has dubbed one DVD featuring two Sesame Home Videos into Creole, and produced three short original films shot in Haiti, specific to the country’s post-earthquake challenges.

The Sesame Street films provide entertainment and learning opportunities for children, and stress the importance of physical activity, healthy eating, teamwork, and play. Cinderelmo, starring Keri Russell, Kathy Najimy, and Oliver Platt, follows the trials and tribulations of Elmo as he escapes from his evil stepmother and seeks true love with a princess. Happy Healthy Monsters features Wyclef Jean, India Arie, other celebrities, and a host of Muppets promoting healthy, active lifestyles.

Accompanying the DVD releases are three live-action films created by Sesame Workshop and the filmmaker Linda Costigan after the earthquake. The films, built around original footage shot in Haiti in partnership with a local production team, promote cooperation, self-esteem, creativity, and hope. Helping Hands features children helping each other and adults with activities such as preparing food and pitching a tent; I Am Haiti reinforces the message that children will be key to Haiti’s recovery; and Recycled Car uses a metaphor of two young boys building a toy car to suggest that Haitians will build their country anew.
This Sesame Street project in Haiti is made possible through generous grants from Connie and Bob Lurie and Motorola Foundation to Sesame Workshop.

Mercy Corps will distribute 1,000 DVDs of the films throughout Haiti, and may distribute up to 5,000 additional copies in the coming months. The DVDs will be sent to schools, orphanages, hospitals, health clinics, and youth centers. The Sesame Street episodes are also being screened at Cinema Under the Stars (Sinema Anba Zetwal), a Mercy Corps-supported tour of interactive open-air events that use film, music, and skits to educate and entertain tens of thousands of Haitians in earthquake-affected areas.

The films will be integrated into Mercy Corps’ Comfort for Kids program, which trains parents and other caregivers to help children emotionally recover from the earthquake.
Comfort for Kids is part of Mercy Corps’ multi-faceted response to the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12. The organization has delivered emergency food supplies, enabled nearly 6,400 Haitians to earn much-needed income, and created drainage ditches, clean water systems, and latrines. Mercy Corps is also providing income opportunities for people in Haiti’s Central Plateau, where hundreds of thousands fled after the earthquake.

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, and ATP Electronics  are releasing Sesame Street Video USB drives with a special “wearable” connector strap.  The collection includes seven characters: Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Grover, Abby Cadabby, Ernie and the Sesame Street street sign.

The drives, which will be available at retail next month, merge Sesame Street’s educational content with a new technological format that enables storage for files containing documents, video, photography, and music.

The drives hold a capacity of 400 photographs, songs and printable content. Each wearable drive comes with a complementary character-specific full-length home video: The Best of Elmo, Abby in Wonderland, Big Bird’s Do the Alphabet, Bert and Ernie’s Word Play, Cookie Monster’s Best Bites, A Celebration of Me: Grover, and Sesame Street’s 25th Anniversary: A Musical Celebration.

Sesame Workshop and AmeriChoice, the UnitedHealth Group company that provides health benefits for state and public programs, are partnering to develop a bilingual education outreach program aimed at helping low-income families make food choices that are affordable, nutritional, and set the foundation for lifelong healthy habits. AmeriChoice will brand the partnership UnitedHealthcare.

The initiative will offer support and creative resources for families with children between the ages of 2 and 5 to cope with “food insecurity,” defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as “households where there is a lack of access to enough food to fully meet basic needs at all times due to lack of financial resources.”  There is growing concern that food insecurity could contribute to childhood obesity rates, which over the past three decades have tripled to nearly one in three children in America being overweight or obese.

Program outreach will include bilingual (English and Spanish) Healthy Habits kits with an original DVD starring the Sesame Street Muppets and a documentary of families along with their children using a variety of strategies for maintaining Healthy Habits for Life, despite limited financial resources.

The kits will also include child-friendly recipes, activity cards, and a parent/caregiver guide with information about healthful eating and ways to make nutritional and economical food choices for the entire family. In addition, AmeriChoice will send Healthy Habits for Life messages and information to low-income and vulnerable populations in public sector health care programs via the web, physician mailings, and member mailings and newsletters that will go to 3 million members.

“With the Healthy Habits for Life partnership, AmeriChoice and Sesame Workshop have a tremendous opportunity to help parents and caregivers gain a greater understanding of the relationship between healthful food habits and children’s healthy growth,” said Rick Jelinek, chief executive officer of AmeriChoice. “We are committed to supporting low-income parents and their children with quality health care every day, and we are pleased to partner with Sesame Workshop to make a positive difference in children’s well-being and quality of life.”

Program development will begin this week with the first meeting of an advisory board consisting of leading nutrition and child-development experts who will inform and guide Sesame Workshop on all aspects of the program design.

Cookies aren’t rocket science, until they are.

As Sesame Workshop has expanded its presence in social media with its @sesamestreet Twitter account, five of its characters—Big Bird, Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster, and Grover—have occasionally commandeered the feed to post some of their own thoughts. Last month, Cookie Monster wrote about how the moon looked like a giant cookie, and wondered how he could join the space program… prompting a response from NASA telling him and others how to join.

That’s the wave of the future, and that’s what Daniel N. Lewis (not pictured) has come to Sesame Workshop to ride. Yesterday, the company announced that Lewis has been hired as its new director of New Media Communications. A veteran of Wikia, Inc. and ArmchairGM.com, Lewis called his new job “pretty incredible.”

The goal, he notes, is to drive traffic between Sesame’s television shows, website, and presences on Twitter and Facebook. “We want to make it a 360-degree view,” he says. The presence is mostly targeted to adults to loop them into Sesame’s current initiative, be it features on the show itself or causes that cross all the company’s touchpoints, like a recent drive to raise awareness and give comfort to children who have lost a parent. “We can do funny stuff,” Lewis says (and Cookie’s tweets come to mind), “but we also have a serious side.”

For more on Sesame Street, visit their website or visit the Sesame Workshop home page.

Sesame Workshop has debuted a new App, Elmo’s Monster Maker, for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The App lets users make their own monster and send it to a friend. Because there are thousands of combinations, it’s easy to change the monster’s appearance and once finished, Elmo will dance and play with the monster.  Best of all, Elmo’s photos of the monster can go straight to a user’s iPhone or iPod touch photo album.

The App features all original Sesame Street video and helps children learn about parts of the body.

Elmo’s Monster Maker is the second Sesame Street iPhone and iPod touch app produced with design and innovation consultancy IDEO.  Grover’s Number Special, a top-rated game on App Store, was introduced in November 2009.  For a free tutorial featuring everyone’s favorite furry red monster, check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VcEBxbaNYk.