PNC and Sesame Workshop

PNC Grow Up Great® is a proud sponsor of Sesame Street, helping to bring laughter and learning to young children all over the country. PNC Grow Up Great and Sesame Workshop have also partnered to produce valuable early childhood education initiatives, including Happy, Healthy, Ready for School, Learning is Everywhere and One World, One Sky.

PNC Grow Up Great is a ten-year, $100 million initiative in preparing young children from birth to age five for school and life. In what is believed to be the most comprehensive corporate-based school readiness program in the country, PNC Grow Up Great aims to produce stronger, smarter, and healthier children, families, and communities.
PNC Grow Up Great is providing grants, sponsorships, broadcast and print content, communications, and volunteer efforts over ten years. In April 2009 PNC Grow Up Great celebrated its 5th Anniversary. During the past five years, it has distributed more than $17 million in grants to Head Start and other initiatives that support early childhood education. Through a progressive policy that permits 40 hours a year of paid time off to volunteer, PNC employees have volunteered over 115,000 hours at early childhood education centers.

Through PNC arts and science grants, teachers receive professional development training and children gain opportunities they may not otherwise have to broaden their experience and knowledge. In 2009, PNC launched Grow Up Great with Science, an initiative which supports 14 regional science centers and non-profit organizations to enhance early science education. The funding enables the organizations to help teachers create classroom activities for children and to extend free visits to the centers’ interactive exhibits to families. PNC has also supported many arts and cultural institutions to create programming for preschoolers. Studies have shown that an arts-rich environment helps children succeed in school and improves cognitive learning skills.

To bolster its efforts, PNC partners with some of the most respected early education experts and nonprofit organizations in the country. In partnership with Sesame Workshop, PNC developed Happy, Healthy, Ready for School, an initiative to help parents, caregivers, and teachers prepare children for a lifetime of learning. This first phase of the initiative addressed school readiness in terms of the whole child -- including cognitive, social, and emotional abilities. The first kit, titled “Sesame Street’s Happy, Healthy, Ready for School”, provided simple ways to create teachable moments that develop children’s physical, emotional, and cognitive skills. It promoted the importance of school readiness as well as empowered parents as a child’s first and most important teacher.

In the second phase of the initiative, Sesame Workshop and PNC created the bilingual Learning is Everywhere multimedia kit to help parents maximize the teachable moments that occur throughout children’s daily routines.

Happy, Healthy, Ready for School: Learning is Everywhere
Developed in 2008, Learning is Everywhere is the latest phase of the Happy, Healthy, Ready for School program. Learning is Everywhere helps parents turn everyday experiences into learning opportunities. It provides tools to help children learn through discovery by asking, doing, and exploring throughout their everyday routines.

The free bilingual, multimedia kits include a magazine for parents and caregivers, a children’s activity book and cards, along with an original Sesame Street DVD that follows Elmo, Abby Cadabby, and their friends on a learning adventure through the everyday moments they have at home and on the go. More than 500,000 kits have been distributed as part of the Happy, Healthy, Ready for School initiative.
Kits are available for free at any PNC branch and can be downloaded at pncgrowupgreat.com.

Growing Up Great Together Under One Big Sky
Major Funding from the PNC Grow Up Great initiative helped to create Sesame Street’s One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure, a cross-cultural planetarium show geared toward children ages 4–6 that provides an enriching, exciting and interactive introduction to astronomy. Big Bird, Elmo and Hu Hu Zhu, a Muppet from Zhima Jie, the Chinese co-production of Sesame Street, observe the stars and take an imaginary trip to the moon, to the delight of children in both the United States and China.

Community Outreach
As an extension to Sesame Street’s One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure show, PNC has also produced, in partnership with Sesame Workshop, the Sesame Street One World, One Sky: Sesame Street Explorers materials.  These materials include One World, One Sky: Sesame Street Explorers activity storybook and activity poster. 

Mobile Planetarium Program
The Growing Up Great Together Under One Big Sky mobile planetarium tour which made its debut in April 2009 features the Sesame Street One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure show. The tour travels to various early childhood education centers within the PNC service area where children might not have the opportunity to visit a planetarium.