Help Sesame Street Teach Critical Health Lessons

After a meeting in Sitapur, India, Sesame Workshop finalized an educational framework—which includes learning objectives and messages for children around water, sanitation, hygiene, health, and gender equity. This framework will drive the implementation, content creation, monitoring, and evaluation of the project. 

We are currently in the process of developing the curriculum for the schools. Teachers in the schools will be trained on the WASH curriculum and deliver 12 weekly sessions to their students. Sesame Workshop is creating new content - including a new teacher manual, two 4-minute films, and a series of print materials for use in the classroom. Students will also be given an activity sheet to take home to engage their parents around the healthy behavior messages they are learning in school. 

The project will launch in schools next month, piloted first in 30 schools and then scaled to 200 schools by next July. 

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Last month, Sesame Workshop and our partner World Vision met in Sitapur, India to kick-off our program to teach lifesaving health lessons to children in India—which will reach 400 teachers and 8,000 school children. Together with our research partner and key stakeholders from local government, NGOs, and the education community, we gathered to talk about the challenges and realities of health programming in India and how to create effective messaging and content for educators and children. The workshop, which is a critical component of Sesame Workshop’s model, helps ensure that our new programming is rooted in local context and tailored to meet the needs of both teachers and children.

Together we developed a healthy habits vocabulary and refined our curricular goals for the new program. Over the course of their participation in the program, children will:

• Know that germs can live in water
• Be able to distinguish between safe and unsafe water
• Always wear sandals to the toilet
• Wash face, hands, and feet properly and at critical times of the day
• Wash fruits and vegetables before eating them
• Share what they learn with other children and families
• Support health and hygiene in their community by modeling healthy behaviors

We also identified what kinds of materials would be most effective to help children learn these new healthy habits, including:

• A training manual adapted to support teacher training and then help teachers facilitate classroom discussions around health topics
• A storybook, comic book, and storymat featuring Raya, our Global Health Ambassador Muppet, modeling healthy habits
• Short live-action videos that will be filmed locally so children can see themselves on screen and relate to what they’re watching, which is an effective way to engage children around new behaviors

What's next?
Over the next few months, Sesame Workshop and World Vision will take the learnings and feedback from this workshop to refine our plans for implementation and begin training teachers on how to use these new classroom materials.

• Help_Sesame_Street_Teach_Critical_Health_Lessons_project_examples.pdf (PDF)