Now Live: The NEW Lerner Blog!
The Element of Surprise in Nonfiction Picture Books
By Carol Hinz, Editorial Director of Millbrook Press
What makes a kid (or an adult) pick up a nonfiction picture book? What compels them to keep reading? I can think of a few different answers to these questions, but today I’d like to focus on the element of surprise. Why? Because surprises help make books fun!
Lerner and Crayola Present New Nonfiction Books for Kids
By Jill Braithwaite, Group Marketing Director
We’re super excited to launch our new partnership with Crayola this fall! It has been great fun to be able to combine the creativity and inspiration Crayola products are known for with Lerner’s expertise in making high-quality and award-winning children’s books.
Two New Nonfiction Series
We’ve got two excellent new series for Fall 2017, available August 1. Crayola Seasons celebrates the colors of the seasons and inspires learning about seasonal changes. Crayola Concepts explores foundational concepts with lively text and vibrant photos.
Each book includes integrated art activities. They encourage readers to observe and be inspired by what they see in the photos and in the world around them.
The Crayola Experience
This partnership has been more than a year in the making. Product Planning Director Jenny Krueger and I had the privilege of visiting Crayola headquarters in Easton, Pennsylvania last year. We got to meet the Crayola team and brainstorm about the new books we’d be creating.
We also got to tour the Easton Crayola Experience. It’s one of four hands-on attractions made for family fun. We saw the largest crayon ever made. It’s a jumbo blue crayon because blue is the most popular color Crayola makes.
We also made our own Crayola crayons! This machine lets you craft your own color name and then prints out a label, which you can wrap around a crayon with the help of another machine.
Other highlights of our colorful trip included a live counter of total crayons manufactured and a color-packed gift shop.
Check out all the new Crayola books from Lerner here.
Enter to Win the “Make Learning Colorful” Contest!
You can enter to win both of the new series and $500 in Crayola art supplies for your library or classroom. All you have to do is pick up your favorite art supplies and show us how you “Make Learning Colorful” in your educational space.
Download instructions and a poster template to get started.
And keep a lookout for the new Spring 2018 titles, available in January 2018. Those will include books about color in nature, art, and science, as well a drawing series and a title about how to make a rainbow!
A Book Designer’s View of ALA 2017
By Danielle Carnito, Trade Art Director
Last month, I had the opportunity to travel to the 2017 American Library Association (ALA) conference. In between the whirlwind of meetings, celebrations, events, signings, and running—literally running—to and from various rooms to hear ALA celebrity librarians and authors pontificate about topics dear to us book people, I found design inspiration in some unlikely places. I also found and (finally) met in person the award-winning illustrator, R. Gregory Christie.
More Award-Winning EBooks with Audio Available this fall
By Jeff Mitchell, Digital Product Manager
For the past few years, Lerner Digital has helped the most reluctant of readers build key literary skills by offering ebooks with voice narration and sentence highlighting. This fall, we’ve expanded our award-winning Audisee® collection to include 865 ebooks with audio. Now it’s even easier to engage students with high quality stories on digital devices.