Tagged: literacy

Reading Rainbow is back - but not on TV.

Host LeVar Burton has revived the popular franchise, which ran for 26 years on PBS, as an app for tablets.

The medium may be different, but the mission is the same: promoting children's literature.

"Television is a one-way medium," Burton says. "You are presenting your finished product to an audience and they absorb it.

"The great thing about an app is that it is designed to be an interactive experience."

Abdi Hussein sits in a cramped classroom full of old metal chairs that clank and scrape the faded tile floor.

Here he learns English idioms like “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

It’s a long way from Somalia, where Hussein struggled to find food and lived in constant fear of being dragged into the country’s ongoing civil war.

“There’s horrible things,” Hussein says. “People kill each other. That’s why we get help to get in here. People call us the refugee.”

Hussein lives in a growing Somali community in Buffalo - where inexpensive housing has proven fertile ground for ethnic neighborhoods made up largely of refugees.

In several locations throughout Western New York and the nation this morning, volunteers were reading the children's book "Llama Llama Red Pajama." The mass reading of this popular book had two goals... first, to set a world record and second, and more importantly, to raise awareness of early educational gaps caused when children are not reading at an early age.