Learning from mistakes; making new friends; resolving conflicts: these are the kinds of early childhood struggles with which Little Children, Big Challenges will help young kids cope. The initiative will help children from every background, including those of military and veteran families, remain resilient while working through these and other challenges.

The bilingual (English/Spanish) initiative will feature online, interactive resources for parents and children, as well as the “What We Are” anthem, which you can watch above. The anthem will be performed live by the Quantico Marine Corps band, Sesame Street’s Gordon, Elmo and Rosita, and Matt Rogers, the host of Lifetime’s Coming Home, at a special event aboard the Intrepid this Saturday, May 26.

Major support for Little Children Big Challenges is provided by BAE Systems, Inc. Generous support is provided by The Prudential Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the USO, and Military Child Education Coalition.

To learn more about how Sesame Workshop is helping children build resilience, visit the Little Children, Big Challenges page at SesameStreet.org or Sesame Street’s military families website.

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The students are so appreciative of Mrs. Cooney’s support that they asked Elmo to stop by the school, located in the South Bronx, so they could record a special message thanking her.

Joan Ganz Cooney became the kindergarten class’ “namesake” in 2009. Many of the students at Girls Prep come from poor backgrounds. 100 percent of the students are African-American, Latina or of multi-racial decent. Children in communities like the South Bronx are the kind of students Mrs. Cooney was hoping to reach when Sesame Street first aired in 1969. And although they move onto the class of a different inspiring woman after they graduate kindergarten, the foundations for a lifetime of education are established while the girls are in the “JGC” class, as it is known. Every girl in the JGC class has signed the Commitment to College Completion and has a college savings account established by the school.

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The site is made up of three sections, titled “The Show,” “Grown-ups,” and “Meet Sesame Street.” The first includes segments from Sesame Street’s Big Bird Looks at the World, the Chinese version of Sesame Street, created in partnership with Shanghai Media Group’s Toonmax. “Grown-ups” has professional parenting tips to help Chinese families with their children’s mental, physical and emotional development. And “Meet Sesame Street” has information about Sesame Workshop’s research model, our historical international educational efforts both inside and outside China and the Workshops’ key partners. The website is also highly interconnected with Weibo and Kaixin, two extremely popular Chinese social media networks.

Sesame Workshop first began helping Chinese children fulfill their full potential in 1983 when we collaborated with CCTV to create Big Bird in China. With the launch of the Sesame Street China website, we’re proud to continue that tradition.

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The Mandela family, Mayor Bloomberg and Grover at an event for the Zenani Campaign on May 2.

“Every year almost 1.3 million people are killed and millions more injured on the world’s roads – and many of those victims are children. That is simply unacceptable.”

Those words, spoken by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week, are taken very seriously here at Sesame Workshop.  Continuing its support of the UN’s Decade of Action for Road Safety, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street is working with partners from around the world to help raise awareness and promote safe road practices.  Most recently, we teamed up with Mayor Bloomberg and the family of former South African President Nelson Mandela to help support the Zenani Campaign, aimed at increasing road protection for children, especially those in developing countries.

According to some estimates by 2015 road crashes will be the number one killer of children in Africa, surpassing both Malaria and AIDS. Nelson Mandela himself has already lost a young family member to a traffic accident: Zenani Mandela, for whom the campaign is named.

Promoting the health and wellbeing of children the world over is at the core of Sesame Workshop’s mission. That’s why Sesame Street’s Road Safety Ambassador Grover and the rest of the Sesame Street family are happy to lend their support to the road safety education and outreach initiatives being pioneered by the Mandela family and the United Nations.

To learn more about the work we do to encourage road safety, click here.

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Sesame Workshop Co-Founder Joan Ganz Cooney signs a contract with Random House in 1984.

In January 1970, less than two months after Sesame Street first aired, Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-founder of Sesame Workshop, received a letter.

“Our editorial staff in particular and many other of our associates have been watching the outstanding progress of your Sesame Street show with real respect and admiration,” read its opening line.

The letter, sent by the Western Publishing Company, was the beginning of Sesame Workshop’s relationship with books, the Workshop’s very first licensed product format. Eventually Western Publishing’s classic Little Golden Books line, which included beloved children’s books such as Sesame Street’s The Monster at the End of This Book (1971), How to Be a Grouch (1976), and The Together Book (1971), was published by Random House.  Today we are still using our imaginations to rethink those classic titles — The Monster at the End of This Book now comes in an interactive app form — and to create new titles that encourage our longstanding curricular goals, such as the Elmo’s Big Birthday Bash! book app.

This relationship wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of a small group of talented and enthusiastic individuals. In the early 1970s it was Random House editor Jason Epstein and Sesame Street songwriter Christopher Cerf who formed the backbone of this relationship. Today, Sesame Workshop’s Vice President of Publishing, Jennifer A. Perry, and Naomi Kleinberg, the editorial director of the Sesame Street publishing program at Random House, carry on the tradition Jason and Christopher started.

“There’s a lot of history,” said Naomi, who has been working with Sesame Street since 1992. “We have got some of the great classics in our library. There is something about these books that gives them timelessness. They have a heart that many books don’t. There’s this wonderful humor. There’s always this message about friendship, about sharing, about community. There’s a kindness at the heart of it.”

A page for the Elmo's Big Birthday Bash! book app.

Although classic series like the Little Golden Books still make up a large part of the work Sesame Workshop and Random House do together, we’re also at the forefront of some of Random House’s newest projects. For instance, Elmo’s Big Birthday Bash! is the first app in Random House’s longstanding print series, “Step into Reading.”

“Out of all the premier children’s brands Random House works with, we are really honored that Random House selected Sesame Street to launch its Step into Reading series into the digital arena,“ said Jennifer.  “It’s also the first original story Sesame Street has created for a book app, and we hope to publish the title in print, showing that inspiration between the print and digital worlds works in both directions.”

When I sat down with Jennifer in her office to discuss Sesame Workshop’s relationship with Random House, the letter from the Western Publishing Company Joan Ganz Cooney received in 1970 was sitting in her in-box. When I asked her about it, she said she keeps the original copy on her desk. “It reminds me in a very concrete way of the legacy I am entrusted with for a short time,” she said. “Everyone who works in the Sesame Publishing Group is proud to be a part of such a longstanding tradition.”

We can’t all have the original copy of that letter on our desks, but I know she’s not the only one at Sesame Workshop who feels that way.

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To celebrate the release of our “Singing with the Stars” DVD, Sesame Workshop artist Diana Leto created a parody of the cover of the Beatles iconic album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Diana and Art Director Mark Magner pulled from Sesame Street’s vast library of characters to create an intricate reimagining of the album’s cover art.

In the middle of the poster stand Oscar the Grouch, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster and Elmo. They’re placed exactly where John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr stood, their fur color matching the color of the suit of the corresponding Beatle.

There are plenty of other winks and references throughout the piece. Near the bottom right of the original cover stands an unidentified bust from the house of John Lennon. Diana and Mark switched it out with a bust of composer Joe Raposo, who wrote the Sesame Street theme song among other classic songs from the show. To the left of the Beatles is an image of the fab four from their mop top days. In our poster, we replaced them with old school versions of Cookie, Big Bird and Oscar. Bert and Ernie take the place that the great comedic duo Laurel and Hardy took on the original cover. Just to their right, where Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, stands on the original cover, is a black and white image of a “Mad Hatter” Grover. Forgetful Jones, always donning his trusty cowboy hat, stands in place of Tom Mix, a star in many early Hollywood Westerns.

Lead Artist Diana Leto works on the poster.

Not every character on our version references the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s.” Diana and Mark wanted to make sure as many characters as possible were included. But there are plenty of inside jokes and subtle references to the original cover that we haven’t mentioned. See how many you can find!

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Ed. Note: Louis Henry Mitchell is the Associate Design Director of Special Projects. He was recently tasked with drawing chalk murals of the Sesame Street Muppets^TM on the 8^th floor of Sesame Workshop’s offices. The drawings have become an office favorite, so we invited Louis to talk about his creative process.

When Sesame Workshop’s CEO Mel Ming asked me to draw murals on the recently opened 8^th floor of Sesame Workshop’s offices, I was excited and intrigued. Despite having been a professional artist for 35 years and having worked with Sesame for 20 of those, the murals presented some real challenges. I had worked on a black background before but never to this degree of detail, and, except for Elmo I had never drawn such large versions of some of the characters.

I began with Elmo. When I first put the chalk to the wall, I honestly did not know what I was going to do. I wasn’t sure how the chalk would react to the surface. I knew how large I wanted to draw Elmo but didn’t know if the fur texture effect would work at that size. I made each stroke without knowing what would be next.

As the drawing evolved, I began to realize what was unique about both the surface and the chalk. I could use the black wall to shape their smiling mouths and to make their eyes pop. It also created natural shadows in the characters’ fur, giving it an especially textured, vivid look. The chalk was so cooperative. The drawing of Elmo became a model for the drawings of Grover, Cookie Monster, and Oscar the Grouch with Slimey. But Big Bird was still to come and I did not know how I would accomplish the feather texture.

Each drawing has something unique about it. The drawing of Big Bird is actually life-sized: eight feet, two inches tall! It’s the first time in all these years that I’ve actually drawn a life-sized version of Big Bird and I learned how to create the feather texture as I drew him. I drew Grover upside-down, which I had never done before. And I was able to make Oscar’s trashcan look completely solid despite using a minimal amount of chalk.

It was a wonderful project to be a part of. After working with Sesame Street for 20 years, it’s a gift to continually find new ways to work with materials and portray our most beloved characters.

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Promoting the health and wellbeing of children around the world is a critical part of Sesame Workshop’s mission. That’s why we’re excited to support USAID’s Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday child survival campaign. The above video, which pulls together footage from our international co-productions, highlights the importance of vaccination campaigns, hand washing, malaria control and HIV anti-stigma efforts to our educational content across the globe.

To learn more about “Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday” campaign, please click here. To learn more about Sesame Workshop’s work around around the world, please click here.

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Click here to download the Military Families Highlights Video

For years Sesame Workshop has been working to better the lives of military families. We’re excited to present research and analysis which demonstrates just how effective our military families initiative has been. At a panel moderated by Bob and Lee Woodruff, both widely respected journalists and founders of the Bob Woodruff Foundation, Sesame Workshop unveiled the findings of a report by the Military Families Research Institute, Russell Research and the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, Uniformed Service University of the Health Science, on the ways in which Sesame Workshop’s outreach efforts have helped military families persevere through the challenging transitions that accompany military life.

The panel included an esteemed group of experts: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey; Charles E. Milam, Principal Director for Military Community and Family Policy, Office of the Secretary of Defense; Patty Shinseki, Board Member of the Military Child Education Coalition and advisor for Joining Forces, a White House initiative that brings attention to the needs and sacrifices of veterans, service members, military families and their children; Dr. Stephen Cozza, Colonel USA (ret.), Associate Director, Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, Uniformed Services University of the Health Science; Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Senior Vice President Outreach and Educational Practices at Sesame Workshop; Dr. Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, Professor and Director, Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University; and Major Nico Marcolongo, USMC (ret.), Program Manager, Challenged Athletes Foundation Operation Rebound.

The panel was on Wednesday, April 18. You can watch highlights from the event above.

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