1. Maria Goncharenko’s books for teaching bilingual children are now available at asordi.com.

2. A big summer sale has started at asordi.com. Get a 20% discount on the books of the Soroka and Sarafan Courses, including the book “Vassily the Cat”.

3. A new section titled “Samizdat” (SELFPUBLISHED) designed specifically for teachers who want to publish their materials but, for some reason, are unable to work with established publishers, was introduced on the YouTube channel.

The subjects we have already covered and to which I’d like you to pay attention are:

• An interview with Olesya Baltak – how many words per line, lines per page, and chapters a graded reading book should have;

• A presentation of Tekstometr, a tool that allows you to independently analyze the text and determine whether it meets the specified level;

• Technical aspects of publishing on Amazon and Teachers Pay Teachers;

• Publishing your own magazine for bilingual children.

First, let’s see what the Teacher’s Book says. In the course, we have a matrix of learning designed to conduct all the lessons from the Activity Book and the Student’s Book of Sarafan 1. Thus, we read the instructions and it turns out that we should start our work with a picture from Exercises 8 and 9 in the Student’s Book. We scrutinize it, note some interesting details, and answer the questions from Exercise 9. Later those questions and responses will serve as the basis for further work on Exercise 9 in the Activity Book.

Why don’t we have keys to these assignments? We don’t have them because these tasks refer to creative work; here students apply the material they remembered and master the knowledge they gained. Answers can vary significantly in these tasks.

When I was writing the Sarafan book, I assumed that my students should first complete Soroka 3. Because Exercise 9 in Sarafan 1 is exactly the same as we did in Soroka 3, I propose to get back to the Student’s Book and Activity Book of Soroka 3 so that we can refresh our memory.

So, we go back to Soroka 3 and see that from the very beginning of the Activity Book, students write lists. This is the first stage that prepares them to make a short text.

On Page 28, we start to apply the scheme for the first time. We look at words and cross the odd ones out.

On Page 32, Lesson 8: Now the scheme contains the gaps, which we need to fill in independently. But, as we have seen a short text in the upper part of the page, we already have an idea of what it should look like in the following exercises.

On Page 40 of the Activity Book, the scheme looks the same as in Sarafan 1. Here, we describe the picture from Page 6. We watch carefully, decide what we are going to write about and get down to work. As in any creative work, various answers are possible since each student performs it at his own discretion. Students can describe the exercise, or a man in the picture, or the situation. Here we learn to make short sentences, which we will further merge into one text.

I hope I have answered all questions concerning the exercises in the Activity Book. If there is anything you would like me to cover, you are welcome to comment below.

All the best!

When I was writing “Sarafan 1,” my idea was to show Russia and tell some facts about this mysterious and faraway country.

As the country is huge, it was hard to make a choice. That’s why I preferred to go on the beaten track. Being from the Ural region, I decided to choose the characters from the “Ural tales,” which were collected and published by Pavel Petrovich Bazhov. I grew up with the characters of these tales: the Silver Hoof, the Fire-Fairy, the Stone Flower and the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, who could turn into a little lizard. So you walk in the forest, see a little lizard and think: “Could it be the Mistress herself?”

Besides the Ural, the characters of “Sarafan 1” fly to Kamchatka and see volcanoes there. They view the Northern Lights in Murmansk and visit Lake Baikal.

Why do they choose these places for visiting?

It is no accident. When I was selecting material for the course, I recalled how one boy living in the U.S. became interested in the Northern Lights. Then I thought that for other boys and girls, it might also be interesting.

Also, my pen friend from France constantly mentioned Lake Baikal in conversations. She even started to learn Russian, because she dreamed of visiting this place.

As for Kamchatka, it is a remote and hard-to-reach region; I read about it when I was a child. And recently one of my students traveled with his parents to Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. to see geysers. When they came back from the trip, he asked me, “Are there any geysers in Russia?” This is how geysers and Kamchatka appeared in the Sarafan book.

As you may see, there is little information about Moscow and St. Petersburg in the book; there is only a short reference to the Moscow Museum. However, it has enough information about monuments from other cities, such as those devoted to the Nose, the Letter “YO,” the Family and others. What’s the reason? Believe me, I love both Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I really have something to tell about these cities. In other books and sources, a lot is written about them, but nothing is written about the Ural and Kamchatka.

Finally, in “Sarafan 1” there is a thing that only a few people can notice. In the beginning of the story we meet aliens who are looking for a landing site; and Natasha who goes with her cat Sasha from Chelyabinsk to the country, explaining the grammar rules on the way. The details that we learn from different pages in the beginning, we encounter in the last pages, as well.

Natasha and Sasha find a baby alien on the lakeshore somewhere in the Ural, bring him tea and send him home to his mother. At the end of the story we see a quote from the popular cartoon.

I hope I have answered all questions concerning country studies in “Sarafan 1.” If anything remains unclear, you are welcome to write your questions in the commentary sections. All the best!

The Student’s Book for Sarafan 1 helps students to learn grammar – specifically, finishing all the cases – by engaging them with exercises presented with a travel theme. Besides learning how to name different countries and languages in Russian, students will learn how to say that they go from one place to another. Within the pages of the Student’s Book, they will explore Russia with a crew of cosmonauts; visit Lake Baikal in the south of Siberia, and the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula; marvel at polar nights (Aurora Borealis) in Murmansk; and enjoy the warm hospitality of people in the Ural mountain range. As with the Soroka series, techniques used include exercises, dictations and oral drills. 

The Sarafan 1 Activity Book, through the use of grammar exercises, lets students practice cases. New in this series are dictation exercises to help with the listening and understanding of spoken words and dialogues. There is a lot of review, and students revisit lessons learned in the three levels of the “Soroka: Russian for Kids” series. The “Sarafan” series follows the same pattern as the Soroka series, with a Student’s Book, Activity Book and Teacher’s Book.

The Sarafan 1 Teacher’s Book has two parts: The first is made up of standard recommendation for all lessons, while the second comprises individual recommendation for every lesson with answers, scripts of dictations and listening exercises. After Lessons 3 and 6, there is a test. Also included are more oral drills, and two vocabularies — one for Sarafan, and another that combines the Sarafan and Soroka vocabularies.

All the books are available in Russian on my web-site https://sorokam.com/en