"Places! Places everyone!", yells Prairie Dawn. So begins a Sesame Street "play on words", hosted by the show's hilarious odd couple, Bert and Ernie. This video, cleverly titled Bert & Ernie's Word Play, features an ongoing story line involving plenty of favorite muppets from the show, in addition to educational vignettes that help reinforce word recognition skills.
The focus of this video is on whole words rather than individual letters. Ernie has all the words for the show in his bag, and he presents one word at a time on a magnetic board. Throughout the show, Ernie "plays" with the words to form smaller words, including the word "go" that triggers the pie-flying contraption to fling a pie--at Bert, of course!
Various skits from the Sesame Street show are featured, including Kermit's frustrating visit to the T-shirt shop, penguins singing "Keep it Cool", and the wildly infectious "fat-cat-sat-hat" skit in which Animal takes off in a fantastic and exhausting rhyming frenzy.
Elmo and Zoe demonstrate to the invisible but audible audience a very "yummy" word--cookie! This perfectly sets up a wonderful song-and-dance routine performed by Cookie Monster, entitled "One Little Letter". The lovable, googly-eyed, cookie-loving monster changes "one little letter" in words in order to make them "better"--and yummier. A wish becomes a fish, a parrot turns into a carrot, a dime becomes a lime, and so forth. Throughout the show, little viewers watch Prairie Dawn fret over the show's finale after Grover's singing telegram has made it clear that the scheduled final act, Ho-Ho, is a "no-show".
This video demonstrates, through a variety of entertaining skits, that words are not merely groups of letters of the alphabet. Instead, words have meaning and they can be fun! Of course, preschoolers are not expected to learn to read by viewing the video, but they definitely will benefit from the exposure to rhymes, word families, and more. If you can convince your Kindergarten-age child to watch, which probably won't be too difficult, the educational value jumps to an exciting new level. Learning early reading skills is never heavy-handed with Sesame Street. The playful approach does not teach children serious skills for learning to read, but it does set up a confidence-boosting foundation.
