The Reading Rainbow tablet app is busier.
Reading rainbow series#
The television series also featured real-life kids trumpeting their favorite books. LeVar and the gang would go on trips related to the featured books: they’d ride hot air balloons, bury time capsules, and learn sign language from Koko the gorilla. In the television version, a soothing voice read books to viewers as illustrations drifted across the screen like fish in an aquarium. The Reading Rainbow of today is different than the one I remember from childhood. Within thirty-six hours of its release, it became the most downloaded educational app on the iTunes store it’s remained one of the most popular reading apps, with more than fifteen million books and videos accessed since it launched. In 2012, RRKidz announced that it had built a Reading Rainbow tablet app. “LeVar and I looked at each other-wow.” In 2011, Wolfe and Burton licensed the Reading Rainbow brand from WNED Buffalo and formed a business called RRKidz, with Wolfe as its C.E.O., to bring the program back to life in another form.
“People were saying, I’m twenty-seven, I have my own kids, I naturally presumed it would be available, I’m so sad,” Wolfe told me. In 2009, Burton and Mark Wolfe, who had been a producer on the show, were listening to an NPR program covering the end of “Reading Rainbow,” and audience members started calling in to express their dismay. Reruns stayed on the air until 2009, when PBS pulled the show from its lineup.īurton had known that “Reading Rainbow” was beloved, but he didn’t realize what a cult classic it was until it was gone. Funding that did remain available for language arts went to programs emphasizing basic skills like phonics and spelling rather than the love and mastery of reading. Some federal money for literacy programs was diverted to math and science education.
But, in the early aughts, the funding that supported the show began to disintegrate, Donald Boswell, the president of WNED Buffalo, “Reading Rainbow”’s home station, told me. It was beloved in schools: in 1997, teachers rated “Reading Rainbow” as the best public-television program they’d used for educational purposes, according to a Corporation for Public Broadcasting study. “Reading Rainbow,” hosted by the actor LeVar Burton, began airing on PBS in 1983.
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