Cook County announces Undertaking Rainbow to deal with pandemic understanding losses

Prepare dinner County has developed an schooling system aimed at helping fill a a few-month studying gap brought on by the pandemic.

Undertaking Rainbow is an early education initiative that options to roll out totally free and available movie content and repurposed discovering resources by using the county tv channel and a new county application. The content was made and mostly compensated for by 24 companion businesses.

“Project Rainbow speaks to the county’s initiatives to bridge the electronic divide in innovative digital fairness, with approximately a quarter of the homes in Cook County missing obtain to broadband,” Cook dinner County Board President Toni Preckwinkle claimed Wednesday. “We’ve been by means of a storm with the pandemic upending lifetime as we understood it. But following a storm, constantly comes the rainbow.”

The software is expected to present a very long-expression tactic to supplement in-particular person instruction and defeat the academic obstacles professional by little ones 3 to 6.

Erickson Institute, a single of the undertaking companions, stated immigrants and small children of shade are much less probably to have obtain to top quality early childhood instruction applications and these exact same college students are a lot less very likely to have residence online connections.

“We know that on line finding out is under no circumstances likely to switch in-particular person education,” mentioned Alan Mather, president of Golden Apple. “But in these complicated situations, for mom and dad to have equipment to have interaction their children and for small children them selves to be engaged, this is vital. So we are pleased to be in a position to deliver these lessons that professional actors will be accomplishing.”

Golden Apple academics intended the curriculum for the task and aligned it to meet up with condition expectations. Classes that will be available are available to individuals in unique education and learning as perfectly as twin-language learners.

The venture was the strategy of Nick Shields, communications and general public affairs director for the Cook County president’s place of work, who noticed firsthand the consequences the pandemic had on his a few kids.

“In the months and months ahead, we will disrupt how the neighborhood government employs its current tv station,” Shields mentioned. “Through this free initiative, we’re searching to inform, inspire, and effects our youngsters and families in the most positive way. As our written content library grows, powered by a curriculum made by teachers, young learners will be in a position to practice their ABCs and so a lot a lot more.”

Some of the material getting made readily available will function instruction about the county’s forest preserves and what lives in them initially techniques of money literacy the galaxy and how it is effective and even a small Shakespeare. Previews of Forest Preserves of Cook County Wild and Fantastic: Fish, Bringing Brookfield Zoo to You: Nocturnal and Chicago Botanic Garden’s Maria’s Mother nature Notebooks are available on YouTube.

Undertaking Rainbow programming will air on Cook dinner County’s cable channel at 10 a.m. and at 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, beginning Thursday, Aug. 12. The application, which was made by college students on the College of Chicago TechTeam and suggested by app industry experts at Microsoft, will be manufactured readily available on Google Perform and Apple in the coming months.