Greetings from 2018! Before we get too far along in the New Year, we wanted to take a quick look back at what we’ve been up to. Over the past 12 months, as we’ve heard incessant references to “fake news,” we’ve been reminded of the power of words and narratives to accurately convey what’s going on in the world. This has resonated with us as we’ve continued implementing Li’l Stories, our language arts framework for kids, and as we’ve started working with The New York Times. We choose to escape all the competing versions of reality with a good book—fiction or non—and we’d like to share our annual reading list of recommendations.

Storytelling comes into play in our work for Li’l Stories, the language arts framework that guides students through the collaborative creation and sharing of a visual narrative. This year we developed several different collaborative storytelling Labs and worked with teachers and classes in one-week workshops at P.S. 3 and P.S. 43. Students had a lot of fun using storyboarding to create their own animal stories, retell books like The Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and develop original stories based on the title character. You can read more about our labs at P.S. 3 here.

This past fall, Li’l Robin began working closely with The New York Times, consulting with their brand identity group to help create design system and cross-platform consistency. For this year’s edition of our annual reading list, we asked our colleagues at the Times for their recommendations. The selected books range from gripping personal memoirs to engrossing novels to detailed scientific explorations.You can find the selections on our 2017 bookshelf.

And last but not least, we’re proud to share that Li’l Robin founder Anke Stohlmann has been named a 2017-2018 Fellow at the Revive the Dream Institute, the non-profit working to ensure all students receive an excellent education.

We wish you all the best for 2018, and hope we become part of each other’s stories in the New Year.