Summon a Sesame Street Character for Moral Support
Many of our favorite authors, actors and organizations are stepping up right now to provide resources and emotional support during the coronavirus outage, but Sesame Street is winning this week. First they offered us a special ” pandemic date ” with Elmo, and now they give the kids the opportunity to “call” their favorite character for advice on how to get through the crisis and offer us a short animated series called Monster Meditations .
Grover and Oscar Grumpy jotted down posts with helpful tips for kids (or adults, let’s be honest). One is sweet and uplifting; the other is, well, more grumpy. Both were recorded for the Southern California public radio station KPCC and premiered on the AirTalk public relations news program with Larry Mantle . You can listen to the messages online or call 626-831-9333 to listen to the recordings over the phone.
A KPCC spokesperson told Scary Mommy that they asked the Sesame Street voice actors to record social distancing messages for their listeners:
“We thought it would help parents who need something to help them explain the importance of social distancing to their children,” KPCC tells us. “The dialing number provided was developed by our Community Engagement team using GroundSource, which we use to send messages to community members with resources. In the first 24 hours, we received over 600 calls. We hope to see more calls! “
And here are a few words from Oscar , who is unsurprisingly a big fan of social distancing:
Meanwhile, Sesame Workshop recently announced a partnership between Sesame Street and Headspace to create a series of videos to “help kids learn the basics of mindfulness, meditation, and social and emotional learning.” The series will feature six animated short films, each about 3 minutes long, and airing every two weeks, starting with Cookie Monster impatiently baking cookies :
It’s great that the Sesame Street gang are here to support our kids, but their most important message this week may have been to us parents; he came to us from Elmo’s father, Louis, during a special game day :
Take a deep breath … exhale slowly … then go and build a pillow fort. It makes as much sense now as everything else.