Have We Met?
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Short on time? Click here to hear this blog post read to you by the author and LCEP's founder, Rebecca, in the form of a podcast to listen on the go. |
Have we met? Lol A lot has changed since we started our blog (like… a lot). When we started posting back in January of 2023, we jumped right in feet first with content designed to serve teachers/tutors, parents, homeschoolers, and language learners. Since then we’ve put up a new blog post each month and amassed a sizable bank of Freebies for you. What we haven’t done a great job of is giving you a cohesive account of what qualifies us to create the content we create for you and produce the products we design to help people learning or teaching Mandarin. It feels like time. In this post we’re giving you some history on the formation of our company (and how it ties into the inception of some of our products), highlighting one of our best sellers (a book that we couldn’t believe didn’t exist before we made it), and giving you access to our entire freebie bank (including current offer codes) - Our Little Freebie Library.
The Early Years
Little Crab Educational Press (LCEP) co-owners Rebecca Juetten and Lisa Zak are sisters, and the daughters of teachers. As such, we have always had an affinity for education starting from when we would play “school” at home as little kids (Rebecca was always the teacher!) and continuing to this day as we build our language education and classroom resources company.
Rebecca, the Founder of LCEP, had the seed of curiosity for Mandarin planted at age six when she had the rare opportunity to take a Chinese calligraphy class after school. But being a student of British Columbia’s public school system in the 90’s meant only French was offered as a second language until highschool. In junior high school, Rebecca’s friend kindly helped her to warm up her ear for Mandarin by burning CDs for her so she could try to discern which pop songs were sung in Cantonese and which ones were in Mandarin. She then seized the opportunity to take formal Mandarin classes in Grade 11. Like most other kids in Canada, Lisa started French in public school. She is continuing French self-study as an adult.
During these early years, Rebecca’s first idea for a Mandarin study product was born, something we would later call “Bilingual Boats”, which are special reading comprehension and translation notebooks. They were created to improve upon the existing options of notebooks structured for this work. (We call them “boats” because they look like little rowboats, designed to make sailing between your native and character-based languages a breeze! When we introduced them we made a printable freebie version).
Rebecca later graduated from the University of Victoria in 2004 with her Bachelor's degree in Pacific and Asian Studies, China Concentration, where she had completed nearly every Mandarin language class offered in the department at the time. During her university years she travelled within China twice (totaling 6 months) and had received her first of two different EAL teaching certifications.
The Genesis of Little Crab
Starting in 2006 and continuing through 2007, spurred on by her dissatisfaction with how most bilingual Mandarin and English kids’ books are formatted, Rebecca conceptualized and wrote our flagship book Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任, the first storybook to have our proprietary Text Scaffolding. Those who read a lot of Chinese children’s books with Pinyin will notice that normally the Pinyin goes on top and characters are underneath but there is a reason why our books have their text scaffolded in this way, with Simplified Chinese characters on top, Pinyin in the middle, and English on the bottom: This format is geared toward languages learners specifically.
LCEP’s Text Scaffolding removes the vocabulary comprehension roadblocks that pop up when beginners try to read, but, importantly, it still allows for intermediate readers to challenge themselves because they can use a bookmark or strip of paper to cover whatever they don’t need. For example, they can cover the Pinyin middle layer and English bottom layer and only read the Chinese characters, then slide the bookmark down to reveal the Pinyin and/or the English only when they need to.
Moreover, LCEP’s storybooks with Text Scaffolding make co-reading as a family easier for bilingual or multilingual families when one or more parent or caregiver is a beginning learner of their spouse’s native language of Mandarin or English. Everyone can read the same book at the same time!
Between the spring of 2007 to spring 2008, Rebecca lived in Shanghai and spent a life-changing year teaching EAL at EF English First at the ZhongShan Park location (and, from Nov. 2007 to Nov. 2008 worked as a freelance curriculum developer for EF, creating English lessons that were taught in all EF school locations across China). It was then that Rebecca developed another future-LCEP teaching/study resource, now called the Tortoise Tile Method.
“Equipped with my years of professional teaching experience and with previous years of receiving instruction in Mandarin, I set about creating a better system for committing new vocabulary to memory by literally surrounding myself with my target language in my home.” - Rebecca
At first glance, it’s no mystery that Tortoise Tiles are a spinoff of the traditional flashcard concept but there are some extremely important, key elements in how they are prepared and how they are put to use which make them incredibly effective and, perhaps surprisingly, even way more fun to use than digital or traditional flashcards. Our first set of Tortoise Tile books is the ABCs of Holiday Series, and when we introduced them we included a free guide to enable you to DIY them for use in your home or classroom with your own, customised word lists.
The Formation of Little Crab Edutainment
For a time, Rebecca was slowed down by the extremely steep learning curve of self-publishing, not to mention there were certainly some fast and furious changes happening in the publishing industry during and after the 2008/2009 recession. She registered as a company (at the time known as Little Crab Edutainment) in order to be able to deal with the tax implications of selling her self-published book internationally on Amazon. But she continued teaching EAL and achieved her CELTA in 2011, further strengthening her language teaching skills and her personal self-study skills as she maintained her Mandarin. She also became an IELTS Writing examiner during this period.
The first edition of Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任 (now taken out of print) was finally published in fall 2015, just nine short(?!) years after its conception. For several years starting in 2016, Rebecca was the assistant manager of School House Teaching Supplies (where we are very proud to have sold many copies of the original first edition of Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任) which gave her the opportunity to be up close and personal with teachers of all public school subjects as well as homeschoolers; this kept her ear to the ground regarding what subject areas had resources that were plentiful versus scarce. Her creativity and desire to produce useful classroom resources was spurred on by this experience. School House Teaching Supplies now carries more of our titles.
Evolving into Little Crab Educational Press
Then came 2020. Lisa was just going to help Rebecca update her website design and help her release a new and improved second edition of Little Byron. But Lisa had been working predominantly solo in her own business for nearly a decade, and really enjoyed the collaboration. The pair got into deeper talks about where Rebecca wanted LCEP to go. Up to then it wasn’t exactly a business but rather just a company created for reasons mentioned above. But, inspired by her previous experience as a freelance curriculum developer, part of Rebecca’s ideas for LCEP included language teacher and homeschooler resources, and soon concepts for handwriting practice books, activity books, composition and translation notebooks and so much more became a frequent topic of conversation between the two of them. Lisa loves web, graphic, and product design; Rebecca is a un-shut-off-able fountain of useful ideas. Rebecca had all these years of training for learning and teaching material production under her belt (accidentally - never having made plans to that end); Lisa had a professional background in design, years of her own independent language study, and a perspective as a person who has overcome learning disabilities to bring to the table. It became undeniable that they needed to make this collaboration a concrete thing, so Lisa officially joined LCEP that summer.
Lisa and Rebecca later released the Second Edition of Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任 and after that, developed and released Let's Pretend! - Ràng Wǒmen Jiǎxiǎng - 让 我们 假想! During the time those were being produced, Rebecca also had begun a collaboration with her friend Xianjing Zhang (now part of the Little Crab team) to co-write Xianjing’s idea for a book which became Vegetables! My First Chinese English Nursery Rhymes Collection! - 蔬菜！我的第一本中英文童谣集, released in December of 2023. The aforementioned Bilingual Boats and Tortoise Tiles books were published during this period, and we produced several digital resources as well.
During all of this development, as always, we were keeping our eyes open with the aim to recognize under-served niches of Mandarin and English language learners. Having made it through the global Covid-19 pandemic as a team (in more than just business - this included moving our families in together for 5.5 months in Rebecca’s house!), we were feeling so grateful for all the strides we had made and being on the other side of all the lockdowns, etc, with happy, healthy kids and more motivation than ever to put what we do out into the world. Inspiration struck! In 2023, the same year we launched our blog, we developed and published our Happy Place Collection of guided journals, Study Chinese Gratitude Journal 感恩日记: 一年52个感恩提示 / 52 Writing Prompts for 1 Year of Thankfulness, a resource for intermediate/advanced learners and native speakers of Mandarin, which went on to become our best seller of that year. These books are a beautiful collaboration of Rebecca’s writing, Xianjing’s feedback and editing, and Lisa’s original artwork.
Another big step came in winter 2023 when Lisa and Rebecca made the decision to make LCEP its own distributor so their books would be available through independent bookstores (in addition to existing sales channels of Amazon and the LCEP company website).
Today
For months now, our “shoulder time” work sessions (accomplished between day jobs and home life with two busy kids a piece) have been jam-packed and there are no signs of things slowing down anytime soon. Our most recent undertaking was creating Our Little Freebie Library - a bank of freebies and offer codes all in one spot - because we don’t want you signing up to receive one specific offer and then missing out on others! To celebrate its release and in the spirit of gratitude we feel for everything we have accomplished together, we have created an offer code that allows you to buy all 3 of our Happy Place Collection guided journal alternate cover designs at 15% off (one for you, and two for friends or record 3 years of your own gratitude to see how your life has progressed!). Click here to gain access to Our Little Freebie Library where that code and so much more is waiting for you.
Stay tuned for more great things to come! We’re happy you’re here.
Sincerely,
The Little Crab Sister Team