From Smithsonian Magazine, the story of how Reading Rainbow came about, in part as an effort to combat schoolchildren’s summer reading slumps.
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I realized reading this article that not only did I never have a summer reading slump, I probably came back to school with the opposite bc I read so much during the summer. I had leveled up by the time Sept rolled around.
There's a Netflix documentary about Reading Rainbow, called Butterfly in the Sky that's really great. It talks about how the producers were panicking when LeVar showed up with an earring, or with facial hair - they wanted him to look the same every season. But LeVar stood his ground. He insisted on being himself, which helped make the show about so much more than reading.
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