It’s a wonderful day, and not just cause the sun is shining on Sesame Street. It’s a wonderful day because this morning we learned a new friend was moving in to the neighborhood. Armando, or “Mando” as the gang on Sesame Street has nicknamed him, is join the cast on the upcoming 44th season.

Played by actor Ismael Cruz Córdova, Mando is part of Sesame’s increased focus on engaging with and educating children in the Hispanic community in the United States. The show is constantly evolving and has a long-standing history of modeling a diverse community.  As producers were identifying the realities of the changing American population, it was important to represent that diversity in the new addition to the cast. “Armando,” a writer from Puerto Rico, will join Maria (played by Sonia Manzano), Luis (Emilio Delgado) and Muppets™ Rosita and Ovejita (Carmen Osbahr) as part of Sesame Street’s bilingual community.

To learn more about Mando and his new home on Sesame Street, check out the video above.

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The Sesame Workshop Blog

The theme this year was “Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!” The day was focused on ways families could eat healthy and stay physically active, a cause to which both the first lady Michelle Obama and Sesame Workshop are dedicated.

To learn more about the White House’s Easter Egg Roll, click here. To learn more about Sesame Workshop’s commitment to encourage healthy living habits in our children, click here.

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Since November 2011, Baghch-E-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street, has brought laughter and important lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural awareness to the children of Afghanistan. We’re excited to share with you this behind-the-scenes look at how one of our newest international co-productions gets made. To learn more about how Baghch-E-Simsim gets made, click here. To learn more about our work in Afghanistan, click here.

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Sesame Workshop is best known for our commitment to the mental and emotional development of children around the world. But we’re also committed to the physical safety of children. That’s why, as part of the U.N.’s Decade of Action for Road Safety, we’ve launched a new major road safety campaign in Australia.

Between 2006 and 2008, there were 6 deaths and 430 seriously injured pedestrians aged 0-14 in the province of Victoria alone. Driveway run-overs in the province resulted in the death of 14 children under the age of six and 73 serious injuries between January 2000 and September 2012.

Our campaign, spearheaded by Sesame Street’s Elmo and Grover, hopes to educate children, parents and teacher on simple road safety practices so in the future children’s lives can be saved. The campaign, created in partnership with Australian child safety advocates Kidsafe, the TAC, RACV and Holden, includes a storybook entitled Elmo Stays Safe: How Furry Little Monsters – and Children – Play Safely. The stories, games and activities in the book help encourage important safety tips like holding a parents hand while crossing the street, treating driveways like roads instead of safe play spaces and using correct restraints when traveling in a car. Additionally, a Community Service Announcement featuring Elmo and Grover is being broadcast on television and social media platforms and urges children and families to play in safe places away from driveways and roads.

To learn more about our efforts to encourage road safety, click here.

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That’s why we’re excited to partner with the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation whose National Early Childhood Education Initiative focuses on literacy for young children, particularly those in underserved communities around the U.S. The partnership will develop a program that provides children, parents, caregivers, and facilitators with tools to support young children’s development of essential literacy skills around rich conversations, reading, and writing. This program will provide rich and engaging opportunities for IICF Volunteers.

“We are committed to combining the collective strengths of the insurance industry to positively impact communities at the local and national level, specifically young children at risk of illiteracy,” said William Ross, Chief Executive Officer of the IICF.

The program, which launches in the fall of 2013, will consist of original Sesame Street video segments, downloadable materials for parents, educators and volunteers that help advance literacy for preschool children and a dedicated section of Sesame Street’s website.

Literacy remains a crisis in underserved communities across the United States. Studies show that, by age three, children from low income households knew 600 fewer words than children from families with higher incomes. As long as this literacy gap remains, Sesame Workshop will make closing it a priority.

To learn more about Sesame Workshop’s other efforts to advance literacy in underserved communities, click here.

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Luckily Sesame Street’s Abby Cadabby and her friend Rocio Galarza, Senior Director of Outreach and Content Design for Sesame Workshop, are here to help. On Wednesday, February 20, Abby and Rocio will be taking questions about divorce and separation from parents, children, friends and anyone who has questions about staying resilient while navigating a divorce or separation.

Email us at divorce@sesame.org and Abby and Rocio will record an answer to your question in a video segment that will be posted online next week. In addition to your question, please include your name, age (if you wish) and your hometown so we can give say hello if your question is picked. We will also write you back directly if Abby and Rocio have the opportunity to answer your question.

Let your friends, family and colleagues know too! Everyone is welcome to send in a question. We can’t wait to hear from you.

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Teaching children about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as the STEM subjects, is an imperative we here at Sesame Street take seriously.  STEM is not just a major part of the television show’s curriculum; Sesame Workshop makes print books, e-books, and mobile apps aimed at teaching young children about STEM.

Teaching STEM is a passion of ours, which is why we approached Ridgefield Academy in Connecticut to see if any of their teachers wanted to use our book Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends, published by Dover Publications, in the classroom. That’s when we were introduced to Jerry Nash, a science teacher a Ridgefield who saw a way to take this teaching opportunity a step further.

He had his eighth grade students at Ridgefield Academy film the first graders who conducted the experiments. Then he had a group of third and fifth graders do a voice-over for an instructional science video he made. We were blown away by the time and effort Mr. Nash put into bringing Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends to life. We wanted to feature a few clips from the video (see above) in the hopes that teachers and parents might be inspired to think about new ways they can make science fun and relevant for young children.

If you would like to learn more about Ridgefield Academy and the great educational work they do, click here. If you want to get a copy of Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends, click here. And Mr. Nash wanted to let you know if you have any questions about his approach to teaching science, you can reach him here.

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Afghan children in Herat province listen to Baghch-e-Simsim with their mothers.

While Sesame Workshop is best known for the educational television programs we produce both in the United States and around the world, we believe many forms of technology, both old and new, can be an effective way of bringing learning and laughter to children. That’s why an accompanying radio production has been a big part of the success of Baghch-e-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street. In Afghanistan many households don’t have television; the radio broadcast allows us to ensure that lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural understanding reach as many children in the country as possible.

In the United States, when we mention iconic Sesame Street Muppets like Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, images of the characters immediately come to mind. But for the children whose only contact with the characters is the Baghch-e-Simsim radio program, they have to imagine what the characters look like. Periodically, around special events like festivals or the New Year, Afghan children send in drawings of Baghch-e-Simsim to the radio stations it airs on and we get a chance to see how their imaginations have brought the show to life. Equal Access, Sesame Workshop’s Afghanistan based radio production partner of Baghch-e-Simsim, sent us some of the children’s drawings they had received, and we wanted to share them with you.

A drawing by Noorina Atta Zada in Kabul province.

A drawing sent in by Jalal ud din in Nangarhar province

Drawings by Nazifa and Shafiq, children in the Nanagar province of Afghanistan.

A drawing of the classic Sesame Street characters by Muhammad Imran, a child in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

A drawing by Kamran and Umer, two children from Nangarhar province.

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With that legacy of innovation in mind, we are proud to announce a new collaboration with Qualcomm centered on researching and developing new ways to educate children using mobile devices and applications. By bringing together Qualcomm’s cutting-edge mobile technologies and Sesame Workshop’s expertise in educating young children, Qualcomm and Sesame hope once again to revolutionize early childhood education.

The partnership was announced on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

One of the first educational products created by this collaboration will be Big Bird’s Words, an app that will feature Qualcomm’s Vuforia augmented reality platform. The app will make teaching literacy an interactive experience by encouraging children to use a virtual “wordscope” to search for and find new words in their surrounding environment.

And American pre-schoolers won’t be the only children whose educational experience will be improved by this partnership. Qualcomm and Sesame Workshop will continue collaborating in China and India through Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach program. In India, Sesame Workhop’s Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Indian version of Sesame Street, is using 3G mobile technology to distribute radio content, videos and fun lessons about healthy living, hygiene, literacy and math. This program is critical to reaching children in rural areas where televisions are not commonly owned.

In China, a project launching later this year will provide tips, activities and other tools to help families with young children prepare for emergencies. These are just two examples of ways mobile devices can positively impact young children around the world.

With each passing day mobile devices and applications are reshaping the way we engage with one another and the rest of the globe. With the help of Sesame Workshop and Qualcomm, it will also reshape the way we educate our children.

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