Short Attention Span Sesame
Written: Sep 19 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Accessible, interactive, pulls old shorts from S.S.
Cons: short attention span, little reenforcement, not very creative
The Bottom Line: Entertaining, accessible, and interactive, but not much educational value. Doesn't promote an attention span beyond 2 minutes. A safe, pleasant distraction for your kids, but nothing more.
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| engwall's Full Review: Play with me Sesame |
Finally, a Sesame show for those kids whose attention spans are so short that they can't sit through Sesame Street! Pardon my glibness, I don't mean to say that Play With Me Sesame is a bad show, but it lacks several of the aspects that made Sesame Street a great show. It does have some redeeming qualities of its own.
Description
Play With Me Sesame consists of a sequence of shorts that alternate between classics from the Sesame Street show (the original "C is for Cookie" song, some Ernie & Bert bits, etc.) and new bits involving Ernie, Bert, Grover, and/or Prairie Dawn, including a game of "Ernie Says", one or two games from the Play With Me Sesame website with Bert, a look at viewer-submitted art (with something in common) with Prairie Dawn, and other activities. In most of the new shorts, the characters talk to the viewer a-la Blue's Clues.
Positives
The activities in the new bits are geared to involve your child. This, of course, is highly dependent on the willingness of your child to interact with a TV set. Mine tend to either sit and watch or get up and just do something else.
The older bits can be a lot of fun for parents who saw them when they were kids, as well as for the kids themselves. They stand up to the test of time, and are just as good today as they were back then, even with their low-tech feel.
If you have internet access, your child can go to the Noggin website and play some of the games that are in the show. Particularly, Bert's Pidgeon Patterns and Perfect Pair (in the former, you are shown simple color patterns and choose the last color; in the latter, you find the matching partner to several colored socks) provide some nice visual learning.
Negatives
The biggest problem with the show is that it does not reenforce what it is teaching. One of the things that made Sesame Street great is how the whole show revolved around a few central themes - a letter, a number, and a single plot that advanced gradually between the shorts. Kids had to follow through the show in order to see how the plot turned out, and in the mean time were exposed to the letter and number in many creative ways. Modern shows like Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer, to a lesser degree, draw kids through the course of a show with a linear theme while teaching various more-or-less related lessons as well. In comparison, Play With Me Sesame does not relate its various short sequences together, so there is nothing to draw the child's attention span out.
Also, the show is very formulaic. Each show has numerous new bits that are nearly identical to those in other shows, with only a minor shift in content. Now, one or two wouldn't be bad (I always looked forward to the "one of these things is not like the others" bit in Sesame Street when I was a kid), but at least a third of the show is this way. It is not terribly creative.
Finally, because there is no plot, you don't really get to know any of the characters. Sure, we all know these characters, and so does your child if he/she watches Sesame Street on PBS. But there isn't anything in this show to add to that.
Conclusion
Ultimately, while this show is certainly better than any of the "grown-up" TV on in the daytime, it does not really do much beyond distract your child for a while. There's a little educational content, but it is poorly reenforced. I have no problem with my kids watching this show from time to time, but I just don't feel like they're gaining much from watching it.
Recommended:
Yes
Type of Program: Variety
Program Quality: Entertaining, but not intellectually or emotionally engaging
Best Suited For: 12 to 36 Months
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Epinions.com ID:
engwall
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Member: Keith Engwall
Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 67
Trusted by: 67 members
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