When a hibernating bear is mistaken for a bum and put in a Salt Lake City jail, several homeless children find a way to gain the bear's release.

When a hibernating bear is mistaken for a bum and put in a Salt Lake City jail, several homeless children find a way to gain the bear's release.

When a hibernating bear is mistaken for a bum and put in a Salt Lake City jail, several homeless children find a way to gain the bear's release.

Readings, resources, lesson plans, and reproducible student handouts aimed at teaching students to question the traditional ideas and images that interfere with social justice and community building.

Reading Rainbow is one of the most successful PBS children’s series in television history, earning numerous national and international awards including 26 Emmys and a Peabody Award. But perhaps more important than anything else, Reading Rainbow helped generations of children cultivate a love for books. Reading Rainbow is very much a story of humble beginnings and enormous perseverance. Over five summers, Tony Buttino Sr. and his colleagues at WNED-TV, the public television station in Buffalo, New York, worked in collaboration with educators and librarians to experiment with summer reading programs. But after trialing these programs, the WNED team realized there was a big need for a new children's literacy series and believed they could create a new show with local and national collaborators and friends. After fits and starts, and enough twists and turns to fill a children’s book, Reading Rainbow premiered in the summer of 1983 and captured the attention of 6.5 million young viewers. Creating Reading Rainbow explores the many intriguing and homespun stories that, when woven together, reveal how this groundbreaking and iconic television series came to be. What led to the series being called “Reading Rainbow”? How did the road to Reading Rainbow wind its way through Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? How did a public television station in Buffalo spearhead a movement in education and spark the passion for reading in millions of children? And, what does lasagna have to do with it?

Over twenty years of work and research with homeless children comes together in a scholarly work that puts a real face on the issue of homelessness, especially for children. Most people do not realize that children are among the thousands that are homeless and are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population. The public tends to think about the "bum" on the corner with the cardboard sign or those sleeping under the bridges who accost them for a handout. They do not realize that homelessness has an enormous and negative impact on growth, development, and learning for children. This is an issue that affects schools, communities, and society-at-large. Through qualitative observations in a one-room classroom in a homeless shelter and in classrooms of an elementary school located in a subsidized housing project, the development and use of language among homeless children, classroom interactions between students and teachers, and information regarding the effects of homelessness on children are closely examined. This book re-educates teachers, educators, and the general public, in order to spur a new, more accurate mindset about the reality and consequences of homelessness. The work's larger purpose is to bring about compassionate implementation of the solutions necessary to eradicate this problem.