Sesame Beginnings: Moving Together (NR, 2007)

SESAME BEGINNINGS: MOVING TOGETHER starts with scenes of familiar Sesame Street characters like Elmo, Big Bird, and Prairie Dawn as babies with their caregivers, modeling movements, games, and songs together. Then using the puppet segments as a jumping-off point to their own fun, scenes of real-life caregivers and toddlers on cheerful sets model the types of interactions that a caregiver might continue after watching the video. Sarah Jessica Parker introduces each segment as she reads enthusiastically with a charmer named Sophia.

Moving Together is the third in the Sesame Beginnings series aimed at providing educational DVDs for the very young. Despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatricians recommends that children younger than 2 not be exposed to any screen time (TV, DVDs, computers, video games), the producers of Sesame Street have designed these DVDs expressly for that age group, no doubt capitalizing on the success of the Baby Einstein series.

Segments range from a catchy Hawaiian tune sung by Big Bird's mother to her just-learning-to-walk chick, to a funny game made up by baby Elmo's father to keep his son busy while he changes a diaper. Each of the songs and games reinforces the notion that young children respond enthusiastically to the most mundane tasks when they're treated as a fun game with a caregiver's active participation. A variety of caregiving arrangements (father/son, grandmother/grandson, mother/daughter) are portrayed, and the live actors represent a rainbow of ethnicities, as you would expect from Sesame Street. It was nice to see a young girl with Down's Syndrome dancing and moving with her mom just as enthusiastically as every other child in the DVD.