YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Taps Dolly Parton, JoJo Siwa For Child Literacy Initiative

In honor of YouTube Kids’ second annual Reading Month initiative, the platform has tapped iconic country crooner Dolly Parton and 15-year-old dancer and digital star JoJo Siwa to help foster a love of reading and unlock literacy among children across the nation.

The month-long initiative, through August, will feature a special playlist helmed by Parton, who has been a literacy advocate for decades — and founded a book gifting program called the Imagination Library — inspired by her father’s inability to read or write. YouTube has also tapped Jimmy Fallon, Viola Davis, Kristen Bell, Nick Cannon, and Ludacris to read their favorite children’s books in videos, which are available via a #ReadAlong playlist. For her part, Siwa — who signed an overall deal with Nickelodeon

last year — is headlining a playlist comprising clips from the famed kids’ channel.

In addition to the aforementioned celebs, YouTube Kids is also introducing a ‘Word Of The Day’ tile in the ‘Recommended’ section of the app, which will teach young viewers new words via explainer videos.

Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories

Subscribe

YouTube Kids launched its Reading Month initiative last June — though National Reading Month is technically held in March — alongside top publishers HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and National Geographic Kids. Check out Siwa’s video, introducing her Nickelodeon playlist, below:

Share
Published by
Geoff Weiss

Recent Posts

The last thing creators add, the first thing viewers notice: Why Adobe is introducing music, speech, and sound effect generation to Firefly

In 2023, Photoshop developer Adobe jumped into generative AI with its launch of Firefly. Firefly…

28 minutes ago

Live Nation is capitalizing on the creator economy with a new firm

Ticketmaster parent Live Nation is getting into the creator biz. The publicly traded multinational corp,…

16 hours ago

Netflix gets a bite of ‘Chicken Shop Date’

Netflix is getting a bucket of Chicken Shop Date. Amelia Dimoldenberg's long-running flirty-casual interview series…

17 hours ago

Surprise: Neon is also making an SCP Foundation film, but correctly

Neon, the production company behind films like Parasite, Longlegs, and Anora, has decided it's going…

2 days ago

Noel Miller on why TMG Studios is breaking into fictional podcasts–and why it won’t touch gen AI

"If we're the last human-led media channel and everything else is prompted and generated in…

2 days ago

Mojang is trying to make Minecraft the king of interactive, creator-built experiences

Minecraft has been a beloved storytelling tool for more than 15 years, and its developer is…

2 days ago