Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
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I’m Helen Wu, author, and creator of the Curious Little Bao Bilingual Children’s Book series 好奇的小宝双语童书系列! My vision for this series is to introduce a collection of simple and practical bilingual books based on my real-life experiences raising my toddler. This first book in the collection – Curious Little Bao Likes to Help 好奇的小宝爱帮忙 – will focus on being a good helper! This 6″ x 6″ board book will contain 24 pages of whimsical and realistic illustrations combined with simple sentences and repetitive keywords to help little ones remember the theme and messages – being a good helper! The text will be in Simplified Chinese, Pinyin, and English.
While raising my toddler, it didn’t take long for me to realize there aren’t many bilingual books on the market. Especially ones that teach toddlers basic social skills, manners, and behaviors like there are in English. I often found myself translating my toddler’s English books into Chinese as I was reading to him. It’s something I know not all parents can do without assistance.
In addition to the lack of bilingual books in general, within what is available, the main character is most often a girl or an animal. Even the bilingual books I bought from China are filled with non-Asian boy characters or animals because they’re just translated versions of English bestsellers. Being a boy mom, I was having a difficult time finding books for my boys to identify with. That’s when I knew I wanted to do something about it, because representation matters! I want my boys to be able to see themselves in literature and to be proud of their heritage.
I want to create books to help bridge this gap that includes illustrations Asian toddlers identify with, translations with romanization that enable all parents to read to their children in Chinese, and messages that provide simple, repeatable phrases, which enable children to commit them to memory.
By backing this project, you’ll be supporting a mission to help fellow parents who are looking for more resources that expose their children to bilingualism and diverse cultures. You’ll be part of a legacy that increases Asian representation, not only in the world of children’s books but also in the US publishing industry as a whole!
As of May 31st, this project has raised $6,000 of their $8,000 goal. This project has 11 days left to raise the $8,000 or it will not be funded. For a pledge of $10, you will get one eBook. For a pledge of $16, you will get one board book. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/curiouslittlebao/curious-little-bao-likes-to-help?
