Reading Rainbow

I'm surprised there isn't already a topic about one of the greatest educational shows ever made, Reading Rainbow!

Loved this show, broke my heart when I found out it was cancelled.

You're telling me. I was still watching it when I was in high school. One of my favorite RR episodes was "Little Nino's Pizzeria".

If you were on the fence about No Child Left Behind before, you should know that NCLB (indirectly) killed Reading Rainbow.

There was so much focus put on teaching kids how to read (phonics) that nobody wanted to sponsor a show that taught kids why to read. So RR got canceled due to lack of funding.

Damn government killed part of my (and countless others) childhoods.

I pity kids now. We need more shows like RR now, more than ever.

I miss the old reading rainbow, w/ the cartoon opening.

the later opening had grating music. Also, it was more "urban" & had episodes like "why is my daddy in jail?"

Shows like this were SUPPOSED to send kids to a fantasy world AWAY from the bleak reality of their lives in the concrete ghetto.

Remember the old farm episode? (levarr's favorite ice cream... strawberry, just like me!)Or the one to Montserrat? (sadly buried in a volcanic explosion) or the star trek one, where klids got to learn about special effects.

I grew up in the 80s & 90s, so I got to see the show through it's golden age & it's sad long decline. I eventually stopped watching.

Sesame Street & Mr Rogers had great "how it's made" segments in the past as well.

& Bill Nye had a great way to make science interesting. (mythbusters is a pretty worthy heir, though lacking in the music video at the end)

Well said! At the end of the new theme, the singer's still going "Ooooooh" as the show's beginning, and I actually yelled "Shut up already!".

This isn't just Nostalgia Filter or Grandfather Clause. The synthesizer theme of the 80s was simply better.

edited 17th Mar '12 2:04:06 PM by Premonition45

I love the episode where LeVar goes to a diner, and works in the kitchen: "Ice on rice?!". They even show us how pastas are made.

edited 16th Mar '12 6:01:07 PM by Premonition45

I friggin' loved Reading Rainbow.

Ah, there are some days I do truly miss my childhood.

I found the Bartholomew and the Oobleck episode unsettling, personally. But on the other hand, The Talking Eggs and Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters are easily the best examples of the "one person spectacularly passes a Secret Test of Character and the other spectacularly fails" formula I've ever seen. So atmospheric, you guys. And overall, they had a knack of choosing multicultural books that had engaging stories with broad-sweeping themes. McGraw-Hill will kindly take note.

(P.S.: There is no Bartholomew and the Oobleck episode. There never was. I sincerely hope you didn't remember one.)

Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, that was a good book.

I also liked Archibald Frisby for its great subversion or perhaps Decon-Recon Switch of Measuring the Marigolds.

edited 20th Mar '12 7:34:20 AM by Premonition45

Anybody know Between The Lions well enough to discuss how well the good seasons did at being a decent comparison to Reading Rainbow + Phonics?

You guys might wanna see this.

This is just amazing news

Oh my gosh! I loved Reading Rainbow!! This was the show that really got me into reading and I loved the way it showed how special reading is to children! My favorite episode was Simons Book since it was illustrated by Henrik Drescher and I loved the fact that they showed us how books were being made.

This morning I checked and it was at $10,000. I return six hours later and...

Yay, it's coming back!

One of my friend said it best.

"Man if I can give money to dumb video games I don't even have time to play, I can give money to this"

Confession: As a kid, I never liked Reading Rainbow. My "reasoning" was that my reading level was already higher than the books. Now, of course, I know that it celebrates reading. I should just watch it and enjoy that.

I think for that very reason, I never watched educational TV growing up. I already had a third-grade reading level at age 3; what use would I have for Reading Rainbow or Sesame Street?

I knew the alphabet at 13 months.

I started reading in preschool, and I loved Reading Rainbow anyway. The books were sometimes the dullest part though. The field trips were where it was at.

Anyway, to clear up any misconceptions, this isn't about bringing it back to TV. Reading Rainbow was already back as an iPad app, and the Kickstarter is to expand that into other platforms. The initial goal was a web app and classroom access with teacher materials and subsidy to give it to 1,500 classrooms for free, the stretch goal is Android, mobile, set-top boxes, game consoles, and 7,500 classrooms get it free.

I'm invested in their cause, but it's worth noting that LeVar's company doing this is for-profit, not a charity, and why didn't they develop for Android on their own money? It's an easy port, and low-income families with tablets would probably be more likely to have Android tablets, since they're cheaper.

Don't different devices run different iterations of Android? I'm pretty sure I saw this mentioned as a factor in developing apps for mobile platforms, since developing for one OS is easier than developing for twenty.

From an OS standpoint, Android only has three or four major versions out there. Hardly any app supports before Gingerbread anymore (many by now are ICS and up), and we can rule it out anyway since the Reading Rainbow app has been developed only with tablets in mind until now, and Android didn't have tablet support before Honeycomb. So at most, they'd only have to cover Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, and Kit Kat, if they even wanted to support Honeycomb at this point.

Most iOS apps are developed with support for one or two versions behind the curve anyway, because there are Apple devices out there that are too old to update their OS. (We have a first generation iPad that's still on version 5.3 because 6 and above aren't supported for it.)

The bigger fragmentation issue with Android is in non-standard hardware, but since ICS, Google has been working to standardize requirements, and you don't need much in the way of specialized hardware to run the RR app.