Materials Update #2: Printing

With more than a few delays and bumps in the road, we have finally sent 3 things to be printed: 160 sight word cards, 64 sentence cards and the flipchart. We are printing 500 of each, so we are still waiting to get price quotes from different printers, but the materials have been finalized and they are on there way. Hopefully within a week we will be able to see and hold a final product! What an exciting moment that will be when this project finally begins to materialize!

The title page of our "flip and blend" phonetic blending flipchart. Illustrations were done by Luckshmi and the design was done by RJ, an intern from McGill University.

Materials Update #1: Illustrations

In order to get all our materials ready to be printed we need two things 1) content and 2) illustrations. Most of our content is complete, although it's in constant revision. But the biggest piece has been contracting out illustrations for this project. Not only do the illustrations have to be simple and bold, they have to be culturally relevant and appropriate for rural primary children in India. Currently we are working with five illustrators. We have collected 242 illustrations, but we still need 80+. We are desperately waiting for our illustrators to make corrections, send us sketches for approval and finally send us final images. It has been a really fun process thinking about what images we want to use to teach certain sounds or groups of sounds. And it has been really fun seeing what the illustrators send back to us. We are working with some very creative people. Here are a few examples of what our materials will look like and include:

"This pig has pants." This is the image on the 'p' flashcard.

"A rabbit rides a rocket." This is the image on the 'r' flashcard.

Solution #1: Alternative DVD Production Companies

With the news that our DVD production company was backing out, we swung into high gear and found two other alternatives. We met with them last week to discuss our concept and have submitted samples of our content. They will each write up a proposal and submit a budget by the end of this week. Let's hope our initial budget is within range of these new proposals. Both have different strengths to offer the project 1) is production focused 2) is education and multi-media focused. I'm secretly hoping that there is a way to bring them both into the project. Hopefully we will be able to make a decision and get a signed contract within a week.