Sesame Street: One World, One Sky, Big Bird's Adventure
One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure, featuring Big Bird, Elmo and their friend from China, Hu Hu Zhu is aimed at children ages 4 – 6.
One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure begins on Sesame Street when Elmo’s friend, Hu Hu Zhu, visits from China. Together, Big Bird, Elmo and Hu Hu Zhu locate the Big Dipper, the North Star and the Moon in the night sky. Elmo and Hu Hu Zhu want to learn more about the Moon, so Big Bird suggests that they use their imagination to travel there. Once on the Moon, Elmo and Hu Hu Zhu quickly learn that the Moon has a very different environment than Earth. They discover there is no air on the Moon and learn that without air there can be no trees, animals, flowers or, to their disappointment, flying kites or playing soccer. Realizing this makes them homesick, so they use their imagination to take them back to Sesame Street. Back on Earth, Big Bird, Elmo and Hu Hu Zhu realize that even though they live in two different countries, they still share the same sky.
One World, One Sky: Big Bird’s Adventure was created as part of a global partnership between the Adler; Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street; the Beijing Planetarium and the Liberty Science Center (Jersey City, NJ). Representatives from all four international partners spoke at a press conference held here today to discuss the unique partnership and the project’s main goals: to provide young children in China and the U.S. with an age-appropriate introduction to astronomy; promote positive attitudes toward science; foster cross-cultural appreciation and establish a successful and lasting bi-national collaboration among informal science educators and institutions in China and the U.S.
This project, which was more than seven years in the making, received major funding from the National Science Foundation and the PNC Foundation with additional support from the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, China Association for Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.