I’m very happy today that I can announce a new Genki English book! There’s always a delay between finishing a project and actually getting it out there, and sometimes the shine wears off in the meantime. So today I went and had another look at the real printed Black & White Minicards book, and it’s like Christmas morning again! I love this book!

Last year when we reprinted the CD4 worksheet book the printers came up with the most amazing glossy paper for it. Ever since, I’ve been wanting to produce something to go in the Superpack that would give it a visual boost, as you can’t really hear the CDs in a bookstore. The thing is that colour was out as it was too expensive, and trials of the kids workbooks failed as teachers were paying too much attention to them at the expense of the kids actually talking, and it took till this Summer for the penny to drop and think of doing the mini cards as a real life black and white book! So now it’s really easy ( and cheap!) for you to do copies for all your kids to play with.

It took a lot of time over Summer putting it together as I basically had to re-do a lot of the artwork in order to make it into an outline form, rather than greyscale, so that kids can easily colour it in. One advantage of this though is that I also redid the A4 cards which you can download from the site. They are all now funkied up, especially the weather cards! And as Genki English is distributed in lots of different ways these days, I also couldn’t mention the new book on the website until everyone’s stocks were updated. So if you bought a Superpack or 5 CD Set this month you probably got this book for free anyway! For everyone else, you can purchase it online or get it for free with the Superpack ( remember to ask your school to pay!) or 5 CD Set. The larger Maruzen bookstores should also be carrying it, so you can get it without post and packing ( but you might have to order it!).

And the other thing I can announce is that we are now shipping even funkier new Superpack cases, with a groovy carrying handle to make it easy to carry around, and the inside has been redesigned to make it easier to get to the CDs and books. With all the stuff in there now it really does feel like a SUPERpack, and is worth every penny of the 24,000 yen.

Right, so it’s back now to making the next set of surprise materials!