Grover Goes Global
Encouraging preschoolers to understand and appreciate new people, places, and ideas.
As children grow up in an increasingly interconnected and globally minded world, it is important that they learn to appreciate similarities and differences between themselves and those around them. Preschoolers are natural explorers who are eager to discover the world and learn about new people, places, objects, and ideas. This early exploration often leads to a greater understanding and foundation for global citizenship and civic duty. Despite the importance of teaching global citizenship, there are few resources aimed at teaching preschoolers to understand and appreciate cultures.
Seeing an opportunity to maximize children's potential in this area, Sesame Workshop partnered with the University of North Carolina's Center for International Understanding in 2007 to develop Around the World With Grover: Tools for Exploration.
The multiple media project offers preschool teachers resources and activities to encourage children's natural inquisitiveness and create opportunities for them to learn about themselves and those in the wider world through common themes. From music and food to community and cooperation, these themes encourage children to explore and discuss similarities and differences.
In developing the project, Sesame Workshop's Outreach team used Sesame Street's Global Grover segments, which highlight Grover visiting different countries to find out how children live in other countries around the world. These pieces are an integral part of the project's teacher resources.
| Grover (Global Grover) |
Building on familiar people, places, and themes
A major question in developing the project was how much world awareness preschoolers have. Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop's vice president of outreach and educational practices believes that we often underestimate children's abilities in this area.
"Through media, younger kids can understand another country," she says. "They may not be able to pinpoint it on a map, but they understand there is a slightly bigger place than just their block, and that there are other people that are very different sometimes than they themselves may be."
The team took the approach of building on familiar people, places, and things as a way to also explore how these common things may relate to children in distant places. Rebecca Honig, a curriculum specialist at Sesame Workshop, explains, "Far, far away is a difficult concept for preschoolers. They are more connected to their own family and neighborhood, so that's where we started. We knew we had to take what's familiar and apply it to the rest of the world."
Around the World With Grover: Tools for Exploration includes Global Grover video clips, teacher resources, classroom activities, and take-home pages. The teacher resources supplement the videos, providing background information, questions for encouraging children's exploration and learning, classroom activities that build on the video segments, and handouts for children to take home and extend their knowledge and experiences.
The Global Grover videos and related materials take children to many places around the world, including Israel, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, France, China, and Malaysia. While "visiting" these locations, they learn about life in each country, observing activities like kite making, shopping at farmers' markets, and acrobatics. After watching a Global Grover video, children can choose from the suggested related activities that encourage hands-on exploration. For example, after visiting Puerto Rico and learning how to make a percussion instrument called a guiro, children can make their own homemade instruments, while also finding out how children around the world enjoy making music.
"Whether it's making a kite in Malaysia or building a playhouse in a kibbutz in Israel, preschoolers can watch a group of children focused on making something beautiful and special," Honig explains.
All in all, it doesn't sound like a bad day's work for a certain furry blue monster.