Sesame Street and Barney The Dinosaur are two popular educational shows forchildren. Are they really teaching kids with the right techniques? Are theyteaching kids anything at all? It’s a battle to see which is better: Barney or Sesame Street.
Sesame Street and Barney have totally different teaching techniques. Sesame Street captivates the audience with high joltage and fast scenes. Thechild barely understands what is going on and when they understand that scene,it’s over and the next scene is almost done. The child does not learn wellunder these circumstances. Barney does not have the same JPM as Sesame Streetbut it still attracts the audiences’ attention. The show is slower and moreunderstandable than Sesame Street.
Barney focuses on one topic for every show. The one that I watched,entitled “Up We Go”, was about flying. You learn about kites, birds, planes andmore. You get more out of the show than if it was about many topics like SesameStreet. The one we saw had many topics like eating healthy, dental hygiene, theairport and more. The child can have an overload of ideas for one day and getall mixed up.
Both Barney and Sesame Street have songs in them. I found that Barneyhad many more songs than Sesame Street. The songs are used as jolts and theywork well in getting the attention of the child. I found that the Barney songswere much catchier than the Sesame Street songs. They were slower, and otherthan the dancing, there was not much else happening. On Sesame Street, thebackground was changing, things were flying and colors were jumping. Theattention was not put on the song by the kids, it was put on the actions on thescreen.
Barney, like Sesame Park, showed minimal biases regarding sex and race. The cast consisted of three boys and three girls. One boy was disabled but wasas able as the other kids. The races on the show were mixed. They consisted ofa Latino boy, a Chinese girl, an African-American girl and more. On SesameStreet there was less of a mix of races. They just had the primary races of theUnited States like African-Americans and Latinos.
While watching Barney, I noticed that a main focus was imagination and’Playing Pretend’. This shows that the show is aimed at four and five year oldchildren and h that much younger. Sesame Street is aimed for all ages.
Who won the battle? I think it was Barney. They are both greatchildren shows but Sesame Street is to much energy for kids, and it does notteach about friendship and politeness as Barney does. That is one of the mostimportant things in life. Barney also taught about reading, math, shapes andcolors. Barney has solid educational value, and without the overuse of jolts,they teach the kids.
