PrePrep: The Joan Ganz Cooney Early Learning Program

Named after the pioneering co-founder of Sesame Workshop, PrePrep: the Joan Ganz Cooney Early Learning Program provides a distinctive educational experience within a playfully rich and cognitively demanding learning environment. The Joan Ganz Cooney Early Learning Program builds upon the research from the federally-funded Ready to Learn initiative from 2005-2010, which measured the impact of educational programming, including Sesame Street episodes, on children's science and literacy skills by demonstrating the effect of media targeted at socio-emotional development.

PrePrep is a co-ed program for 4-year-olds, and is hosted within Girls Prep Bronx Elementary School, and Boys Prep Bronx Elementary starting in the 2018-19 schol year. PrePrep scholars automatically matriculate into Girls Prep Bronx or Boys Prep Bronx Elementary Schools for kindergarten.

See our feature on NPR below:

The Pre-K curriculum fulfills and surpasses the requirements of New York State’s Pre-School Foundations for the Common Core (“PKFCC”). Students benefit from a curriculum that offers the right balance of joyful play, curiosity, and self-control, while also placing equal emphasis on character development (such as resiliency, optimism, determination, and gratitude), college awareness, and cognitive rigor across academic disciplines.

PURPOSE OF CONTENT-RICH MATERIAL IN PRESCHOOL:

1. increase vocabulary
2. enhance background knowledge to promote deeper learning
3. accelerate children’s grasp of language and numeracy
4. cultivate habits of mind conducive to inquisitive learning and successful social interaction.

UNIQUE PROGRAM ELEMENTS:

• The program includes curated content from Sesame Workshop’s vast media library that uses engaging characters to develop critical behaviors like self-regulation. This includes, for example, the new Cookie Monster series of videos that help children learn the behavioral strategies necessary to manage emotions, navigate friendships, cope with stressful situations and improve executive function tasks, such as impulse control, working memory, focusing and shifting attention.
• In its first year, we received support from an executive at Sesame Workshop to identify new ways to use children’s media to enhance learning in the classroom, engage families in creating a rich literacy environment at home, and provide early childhood Professional Development for faculty.