Dear friends,

We have created an iPad application of Kolobok for children! With the Apple iPad platform, making children’s books accessible to speakers of different languages has never been easier. Our multilingual app is available in the Apple store now, just in time for the holidays!

Our iPad implementation is perfect for your little polyglot. You can select your language (English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, or Pinyin) at the beginning or switch to any of the other languages on any page. The controls are simple and intuitive, so you can read the story to your kids yourself or give them a chance to master it on their own. You can also use the “Autoplay” mode to listen to our pre-recorded narration in any language and follow along with the text.

At only $4.99, our application makes a wonderful gift – a perfect digital stocking stuffer! Read more about it and get it from the App Store here: www.lingvaerium.com/applications/.

Enjoy the fun and whimsical adventures of Kolobok as he hops between the silky-smooth pages on the screen. We will continue to work with our development group to add more fun and educational features in the future to delight you and your kids.

November 19-21 – This year Lingvaerium made a splash at the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) Annual Convention at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston! We met world language educators from around the country, from Alaska to California to Florida. Talking with Russian teachers from Alaska was particularly inspiring: they have asked us to create more books and materials for Russian and multicultural classrooms. We were happy to discover that people from all over the country appreciate the beauty and educational value of our books! We agree that literature is best when produced locally by and for our country’s teachers, and we will continue to publish materials to support their efforts.

There were many Chinese-language teachers who visited our booth during the book-signing event that we held with one of our distributors, Asia For Kids/Culture For Kids. We learned something new about our Chinese edition of Kolobok – the teachers’ feedback was that the book is a suitable resource not only for Chinese families but also for intermediate-level learners. To help Chinese schools even more, we plan to add Pinyin transcriptions to the Chinese edition.

Most of all, we were glad to hear positive feedback about the authenticity of our book and its strong ties to our rich Russian heritage. And although we intended our teachers’ guide for English and ELL classrooms, we found that foreign-language teachers highly appreciated our idea of using student theater and wanted to apply this activity to their own classrooms. To support them, we are working on adaptations of the guide for Russian, Chinese and Spanish classes.

If you were among the 6,000 visitors to the convention, thank you for coming to meet us!

The long-awaited companion workbook to our beloved children’s book is here! Following popular demand from teachers across New England, we have created a Teacher’s guide and workbook to accompany our book in classrooms and other educational settings.

Our Teacher’s Guide is 32 pages filled with 10 fun and educational lessons for elementary-level children (grades K-2). Each lesson features a thorough plan for teachers to follow and a handout to help guide assessment. The lessons range from Recipes to Capitalization to Reader’s Theater and connect ingeniously to the little world of Kolobok. They include guiding Kolobok through a perilous preposition filled obstacle course and stick figures to assist re-telling Kolobok’s story. No two lessons are the same: they include a variety of literary skills, open-ended ideas, and content in the areas of science, English language arts, geography and foreign cultures. Simple illustrations and a wide difficulty range of activities within the lessons make them accessible to kids of all ages.

We hope that our Teacher’s Guide will become an indispensable resource for educators who wish to share the charm of Kolobok’s tale with their students.

Lingvaerium will attend an exciting trifecta of events this fall, beginning with the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010. This book fair will take place from October 6-10 in Frankfurt, Germany. The motto of the event is “Best Practice – New Ideas.” We certainly believe that Kolobok’s innovative multilingual design is a cutting-edge idea in the field of children’s literature. Although we will not be at the fair in person, our book will be presented alongside others that push into “terra incognito” in the modern book publishing market.

The next event on our schedule is the New England Library Association (NELA) Annual Conference from October 17-19. We will be in attendance during the three days of the conference, which promises to be jam-packed with presentations on a similar theme to the Frankfurt Fair: “Outside the Box: Results, Support, Sustainability.” Come visit us in the Holiday Inn of Boxborough, MA!

Finally, next month we are very glad to participate in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Annual Convention and World Languages Expo. This is the self-proclaimed event of the year for language educators! The expo will be held November 19-21 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA. Thousands of language educators and businesses are expected, with many chances to network in a productive setting. As in the TESOL Convention last spring, we will set up a booth at the Expo to show off our new Teacher’s Guide for Kolobok as well as our upcoming projects. We couldn’t be more excited for this extraordinary exposition. See you there!

Summer is here! What better way to enjoy the season than by running around outdoors? Kids, if you're not covered in grass stains by the end of the day, you're not having enough fun! Parents, you asked for them and they're finally here: t-shirts that are durable, light, and perfect for hot summer weather. We've teamed up with our wonderful local printer to bring your children linguistic magic that they can proudly wear. Available in all kids' sizes, these shirts show a bright, colorful illustration from our book (for adults, we will soon print the same shirts we wore at the recent TESOL Conference in Boston).

Buy t-shirts for your children from Lingvaerium Books today! Show off your love of reading and languages to your friends - take Kolobok with you wherever you go. We DARE you to have so much fun that your brand-new white or gray shirt turns green from the grass stains - just don't wander too far into the woods!

• Multilingual and Bilingual Books in Print. Catalog 2009-2010.
• Samples from Teacher's Guide. Complete Teacher's Guide will be available in the summer 2010.
• Order form

Hooray! Lingvaerium Books and everyone’s favorite Russian pastry, Kolobok, were a great success at the annual Teachers of English to Speakers of other Languages (TESOL) International Convention. Educators and visitors from all over the world came to Boston, Massachusetts, during the weekend of March 24-27, 2010, to discover and learn about our fresh new contribution to multilingual children’s literature. We met a great many new fans at our fun little booth in the middle of the huge Boston Convention & Exhibition Center – we enjoyed every minute of the eye-opening event! We were excited to meet teachers from all over the United States, and from Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Peru, Australia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Iraq, Brazil, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Mexico, Israel, Syria, Panama, Japan, Kuwait, Algeria, Canada, Venezuela, Mongolia, Honduras, United Kingdom, Algeria, Peru, Montenegro, Croatia, Egypt, Spain, Nepal, Qatar. TESOL really was an international convention! Although our booth was rather small, we made it bright and colorful to match our logo and Kolobok’s personality, and we put all of our innovative books on display. Everyone was curious to see what all the buzz was about, and everyone who visited our exhibit seemed impressed by all that we’ve accomplished as a young company.

At the end of the day, we even won a fruit basket and an award for the “Most Exciting Booth”! Since over a hundred companies, most a lot bigger and more established than us, made appearances and fashioned exhibits at the show, this award was a real honor; we were both surprised and overjoyed that our efforts paid off in such a big way. We are tremendously grateful for the wonderful opportunity this convention gave us to spread the word about Kolobok and about all the services we are eager to provide for other multilingual book publishers. Nowhere else could we have found so many new friends and fans all at once, from so many countries around the world! Thank you, TESOL, and a huge thanks to all our visitors and fans. We hope you had a good time, and we hope to see you again next year!

The Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 44th annual worldwide convention is right around the corner, and our very own Kolobok will be making a joyful and tasty appearance! The convention, free and open to all visitors, will take place March 24-27 at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston, MA. Lingvaerium Books cordially invites all of our fans to stop by our cheerful corner of the hall, booth #749, alongside such established publishing houses as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Rosetta Stone. The 4-day international convention “promises to be an information-packed, exciting and richly rewarding experience for all who attend,” with hundreds of exhibits, workshops, forums and educational seminars.

To coincide with such an important, far-reaching event, Lingvaerium Books will debut our new company slogan – Publish • Design • Develop – and introduce several new services that we will offer to ESL instructors and foreign language teachers. Branching out from our traditional children’s book publishing endeavor, we will now offer book designing and production services, as well as graphic design and website design. We can oversee and help with any part of the production process, from layout to printing. And to better reach out to the academic community, we will specialize in developing school websites plus lesson plans involving the fun characters of our books!

Come visit Kolobok’s booth at the TESOL convention and you will get a firsthand look at the wonderful instructive materials that we have already developed for elementary schools and ELL tutors. Not only are these lesson plans based on TESOL educational standards, but they also encourage understanding and appreciation of the folklore and fairy tales that we love. From ideas for skits to coloring pages to family reading projects, we’ll have many amusements on display that you won’t want to miss!

Now, you and your child can both experience the beauty of Russia’s rich linguistic legacy without leaving your 21st century home. In this innovative edition, Kolobok has been carefully translated into modern Russian, English, Spanish and Chinese—especially for the enjoyment of children ages 2-6, families speaking more than one language, and foreign language learners of all ages!

From the dough I was made,
In the oven I was baked,
On the window I was bored,
Down the trail I jumped and rolled,
Clever Kolobok I’m called.

Hardcover edition. Kolobok is printed in English but includes matching captions printed in other languages on re-sealable stickers (at the back of the book). The languages included in this multilingual edition are Russian, Spanish and Chinese. To switch or add a language, simply put the numbered stickers on top of the original printed text. Also, included with this book is a CD containing a narration of the story in each of the four languages. And finally, we have provided a set of numbered blank stickers. We support and encourage families to make use of this set; if you don’t find your native language in this edition, you have the option of writing your own translation on the blank stickers. This book is multilingual, and we want you to treat it as such.

Softcover edition. Our softcover edition is available in four languages: English, Spanish, Chinese and Russian. Choose any two, or more, of these single-language versions and read them one after another.