Last month Sesame Street celebrated its 45th Birthday!  If you’ve read this blog before you know that not only am I a huge fan of the show, but I am a big supporter of Sesame Workshop, the non-profit behind the television production. This being Giving Tuesday, I encourage you to make a donation to Sesame Workshop, or any non-profit that you support.

The story of Sesame Street’s creation is an amazing one, and lots has been written about it (I recommend Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and Sesame Street: A Celebration of 40 Years of Life on the Street)  here are the highlights:

Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop) were created by Joan Ganz Cooney, a woman who was compelled to work in educational television as soon as she learned that such a thing existed.  She originally appiled to be a publicist for her local station, but upon being told that they needed producers, she told them that she could do that, despite never having done it before. She’s said: “I’ve never been qualified for any job I’ve been hired for”. This is a woman who heard her calling and went for it.  She’s one of my personal heroes, and I hope some day to get to tell her that in person.

Anyway, Cooney had this idea that they could take the addictive properties of television, a concern that was already being expressed by the mid 60’s, and turn them into a way to benefit children.  Children’s Television Workshop was started and conducted over two years of research on the best ways to prepare children for school through the medium of television.

For many kids, it was the only program on television that showed a street like theirs, in a neighborhood like theirs, with neighbors like theirs.  Sesame Street, the place, was gritty and urban. The people in the neighborhood were white, latino, and black.  They showcased kids and adults who were deaf and in wheelchairs.  Some grownups were hippies, some were preppies (Bob!).  There were women in the fix-it shop and women who were moms.  There have been births, deaths (my surrogate grandfather Mr. Hooper!), divorce and deployment.  Sesame Street showcased the reality of many of its young, urban viewers, something was revolutionary then, and still rare now.

By 1979 (the year *I* started watching Sesame Street) over nine million kids were watching Sesame Street daily.  I watched Sesame Street every single day from about age one until I was probably developmentally way too old to be watching it.  My parents couldn’t really afford early childhood education for us, and my mother cites Sesame Street as a big reason that I was an early talker, an early reader, and was educationally ready for kindergarten.

These days Sesame Workshop works around the globe to help young children cope with the issues that affect them. Their current initiatives in the U.S. include fighting childhood obesity, a program to help children grieving the loss of a parent, and a program to help children in families who are experiencing job loss/economic uncertainty.  In Indonesia two thirds of children watch Jalan Sesama, the local version of Sesame Street, which aims to teach children in super diverse Indonesian archipelago about their share cultural identity.  In India, Galli Galli Sim Sim, actually comes to the children.  A repurposed vegetable cart outfitted with a DVD player travels to the Indian slums, giving the children there access to an early childhood education program.

I wholeheartedly believe that if we wish to see great change in our world, we need to educate our children.  All of our children, all over the world.  Sesame Workshop is doing just that,  Happy, happy birthday to my friends at Sesame Street.  And many, many returns.

For more information and to donate to Sesame Workshop visit their website at SesameWorkshop.org

Book links are affiliate links through amazon.com.  Any purchase made through those links makes me a few pennies (literally pennies) which help me pay for the upkeep for the site. 

Kitty teaching her cousin about the states at a local Red Robin.  Making dinner time education time!

With the holidays coming up we were starting to toss around the idea of getting Kitty her own tablet. Her desire to use my laptop and my tablet was beginning to take a toll on both my productivity and my hardware.

Super-Dad and I made a list of the features we would want if we were to buy her her own device. She is reading now, so a tablet with a good e-reader was a must. She loves to watch PBS shows on Netflix, so the ability to install common apps was also high on the list . After a bit of going over what it was we wanted, we actually decided against getting her a device. We don’t generally buy things made specifically for kids since A) Our kids are pretty savvy (as I am sure many of my readers’ kids are) and B)They inevitability outgrow them and then you have an expensive paperweight. Anything that would meet our expectations would be too expensive and fragile to risk her breaking it – and one of Kitty’s nicknames is “The Destroyer of Things”.

Then came the Amazon Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition. It launched last month and kinda flew under my radar. Frankly, even if I had seen it, I would have assumed all it promised was too good to be true. Well, two weeks ago Amazon gave me a Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition, and it has lived up to all of its promises and more. While it’s no longer an option for our holiday giving to Kit, it should definitely be on your gift list.

If you are going to buy your kids a tablet this holiday season, I strongly recommend the Amazon Fire Kindle HD Kids Edition, you can visit the Raise website to get a discount. Here’s why:

• It’s Kitty Proof – Even The Destroyer of Things can’t hurt this sucker. Made of super tough Gorilla Glass and wrapped in a “Kid-Proof Case” it’s not going to be easy for her to break. The case is a lightweight rubbery/foamy material that surrounds the whole device like a bumper. It also has adds a surface for small hands to grip.
• Two year No Questions Asked Warranty – Even if she does somehow break it, it is covered under a two year no questions asked guarantee. I asked if that for sure covered user-caused damaged. Ya know, like if it accidentally fell into a toilet? To which the awesome folks at Amazon replied “No questions asked, if it stops working within the two years, we will replace it”. That is UNHEARD of, and I’m sure will be very welcome in most households with “spirited” children like mine.
• Sooo many apps – The Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition comes with one year of Amazon Freetime, a hand-curated subscription of over 5,000 kid-friendly books, movies, TV shows, educational apps, and games. After the one year period is up the Freetime App is still a huge value at $2.99/month for Amazon Prime Members and $4.99/month for everyone else. This is AMAZING you guys. There are books and videos featuring Disney characters, Nickelodeon shows, PBS Kids content and so much more. There are tons of leveled readers, lots of great educational apps and a selection of entertainment videos and games. Kitty has been using this thing practically non-stop for two weeks and has yet to say that she is bored with the content.
• The parental controls were clearly designed by parents – besides having the ability to control exactly which of the Freetime content you want your kids to have access to, you can control when they can have it. The Freetime parental controls contain Wake up and Bed Time settings and kids are locked out of the device outside of that time frame. What we really, really love though, is that we can lock Kit out of any of the “entertainment” content until she has met certain educational goals. Kitty gets a total of two hours of screen time a day( not counting reading time, which is unlimited), but before she can access iCarly or the Hair Salon game, she has to read in the reading app for 30 minutes on school nights and 45min on weekends, use any of the educational apps for 30 minutes(right now Stack the States is the favorite, and has given her the ability to put all 50 states on the map! She’s seven! I can’t even do that! ) and watch an educational video (Wild Kratts and BrainPOP are the current winners in that category) and only then can she watch or play what Freetime has marked as entertainment. She has always been a reluctant reader, and this has helped immensely. I like, want to find the person who came up with this idea and buy them a coffee. It has the reward built right in. We don’t have to nag or police her. If she wants the tablet to do something other than read, she’s gotta read. You can fine tune these settings at any time, so if we take a road trip, or she’s stuck in bed sick, we can give her more time. If she’s having a hard week listening, we can give her less.
• It’s a real tablet – This thing has real tablet specs. It’s the Kindle Fire HD with the Kids stuff on top. When she is done for the night, I log onto my profile and watch a show in bed before I fall asleep. I have access to any app in Amazon’s app store. I watch Netflix on the HD display, the quad-core processor means everything runs smoothly and looks great, and it has a 2MP camera for photos and 1080p HD video. You can skype and it looks pretty good.
• It may be a real tablet, but it was designed for kids – Amazon told me that they started from the ground up when developing a tablet for children. It boots directly into kids mode (no “Mommy, wake up, I need you to put in the password!”) and is intuitive for even the youngest non-readers to use. The lack of physical home and back buttons takes a little getting used to, but as with many tech related “issues” Kitty got used to that before the adults did.

The only real detractor here is the $2.99/$4.99 monthly price tag for the Freetime after your first year is up. It is an added expense, and the parental controls go away with it, but I think that it is such a good value for all the content that you get that I can’t even complain about that too much. When the time comes, I will happily pay it. Practically unlimited books alone is worth that tiny price tag.

I was given an Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition to facilitate this review, but my love for it is all my own. If a tablet for a kid is on your shopping list this holiday season, this is a good bet.

The Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition starts at $149 and includes a case, a two year Worry Free Guarantee and one year of Amazon Freetime. ( if you buy from that link I get some pennies [literally a few cents] to help with blog maintenance.

The City of Seattle is doing a “Neighborhood Revitalization Project” in my neighborhood.  This is fancy talk for “fixing the streets”.  They are totally gutting the roads, putting in new drainage pipes, making them bigger, repaving with more durable materials.  It is a crazy ambitious project that by the time it’s done in the beginning of next year, will have lasted two years. And it’s all happening right outside my front door.  I live on a major thoroughfare and this project, which will eventually be a major improvement, is currently a major pain in my rear.

We moved into this little townhouse one month before the project started.  We were already wary of moving out of our former beloved (and currently way too trendy/expensive) neighborhood, because we lived two blocks from school.  Moving into our current house meant a 12 minute commute in the car.  Once the construction started it added 5 minutes onto our morning commute and a whopping 20 minutes and two miles onto our afternoon ride back to the house.

As I’ve written about before, it can be very difficult for us to get out of the house.  On many mornings I have resorted to bribery rewards. With the construction making our commute painful, one of the best “rewards” I can offer Kitty is the ability to watch a show in the car.  Problem is, with my current Data Plan (not through AT&T), my data is throttled after I reach 5 GB.  I don’t frequently use that much data, even if we do watch a few shows, but letting Kitty stream Netflix, or a show from her Kindle Fire Kids Edition does use a bit of data, and I never want to be stranded somewhere, unable to use the data on my phone because Kitty was too engrossed in Wild Kratts.

Enter the AT&T Unite for GoPhone.  This thing has been amazing.  Netgear hooked me up with this rad device and 1.5 GB of data, so that I could let you know what I think about it.  It has really been amazing.  So far we’ve used it for a trip to school, a trip home from school and in a restaurant.  That 1.5 GB still has some data left, and the best part is that since it’s a prepaid style device, Kit can EARN refills.  I love putting that responsibility in her hands.  Want to watch a show in the car?  Better do some extra chores and reading!

Besides the convenience of pre-paid, I love that the device was so easy to set up.  Even a wi-fi novice could get it going with its default settings in a matter of minutes.  I dinked around a little more so that I could change the hot spot’s name to match the naming conventions we have for the rest of our devices, and even that was super easy.  I had the whole thing loaded up with a new pre-paid card and configured within 10 minutes.

It has good battery life.  The documentation claims 10 hours, and I found it to be a bit over eight, but that’s still really good.  You can take a nice long road trip with that before you need to recharge.  I have a feeling this has to do with the number of devices and what they are streaming.  It can connect to up to 10 devices.  We had up to three connected, with two of them streaming low quality video.

I also like the ability to set a temporary guest wi-fi password.  I had a meeting the other day, and was the only source of wi-fi thanks to the Unite.  I felt safe knowing that I was giving my co-workers a temporary password that would no longer work after the meeting.

 Mobile data is still one of those products that costs more than it seems it should and this is no exception. The data plans are not super cheap, with $25 getting you 1.5 GB or a month, which ever comes first.  It won’t be a big issue for us, as we will continue to use in places like the care where other wi-fi isn’t available, but this tech isn’t cheap enough yet to be your sole source of the internet.

I was given an AT&T Unite and 1.5 GB of  data to facilitate this review.  I have to say it, but you already know that all opinions are mine.