Sesame Street on YouTube

I'm a little bit picky about what I let Little Boy watch on TV. Educational? Good. Violence? Bad. Spongebob? The boy loves it, so I let it slide.

So he's definitely allowed to watch Sesame Street. I read [in The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell] that Sesame Street was the best program at teaching for decades...until Blue's Clues came along. [Little Boy is also allowed to watch Blue's Clues. Steve is hilarious.]

I love Sesame Street's YouTube channel. It has literally hundreds of Sesame Street clips, and a dozen or so playlists. The playlists are awesome because I can start the first clip and it'll automatically move on to the next clip when the first one is over. That means no more running back-and-forth to the computer when I'm trying to make dinner.

And my absolute fav-o-rite playlist is "Sesame Street Classic Songs." I remember most of those songs from when I was a kid.



Seriously, I dare you to watch this and not dance along.

Screen Time

I'm not really big on "screen time" for Little Boy. He gets really grouchy when he's been watching a lot of TV, and it takes a day or two for him to get back to normal.

(He's actually been watching way too much TV lately. Note to self: practice what you blog.)

Anyway, he gets to play the computer sometimes, too. I figure it's good to teach him some computer skills, and I only let him play for 15 - 20 minutes.

So what does Little Boy play when he's on the computer? Well, I'll tell ya: he plays games from PBS Kids.* That's our go-to for computer games for two reasons. 1) He's familiar with the characters. (Ahem. See the note above about too much TV lately.) 2) Most of them have an educational theme.

His favorites are games based on Word World and Sid the Science Kid. Of course, I took a picture when he was playing a not-educational game:

Yeah, the Clifford game isn't my favorite. But he likes it, and we all need some down time, right?

*He plays games from The Head of the Class, too. I swear I'll get around to posting about that site one of these days. Also, this is not a paid advertisement for PBS Kids. We are not cool enough for that kind of thing.