Where the story began
Narratelica, Narrovosoft’s main brand, is more than an app where children can listen to the stories they want to hear. It also extends into a YouTube channel, picture books, and teaching materials under the same name.
One of Narratelica’s central aims is to turn science and sustainability topics into stories that children can understand and want to keep listening to.
While gathering ideas for the sustainability series, I suddenly thought of a friend I had known for many years. She has long been involved in restoring mountain forests in southern Taiwan.
I read the public information available online and thought back to earlier conversations with her. From those sources, I wrote the first version of the picture book.
When I showed her the draft, she asked:
“May I translate this story into Rukai?”
I replied:
“I do not want you to be only the translator. I want you to be the adviser on Rukai language and culture for this book.”
I wanted to know how Rukai people would tell the story through their own language and cultural perspective. I also wanted her help checking whether the method of forest restoration was accurate, and whether the landscape, plants, characters, and details of everyday life were true to the place.
The picture book slowly began to take shape.
We met online many times. During my stay in Taiwan, we also sat down together on several occasions. We worked through a large collection of photographs and other sources, checking the details of the story and the images one by one. The illustrations were then developed with the help of AI tools, grounded in those materials and our repeated rounds of correction.
Four languages, different purposes for learning
This book does not have only one fixed bilingual edition.
Starting with Chinese, English, German, and Rukai, we are planning different bilingual combinations for different regions, readers, and learning needs.
The editions that include Rukai are intended for readers interested in learning the language, encountering Rukai culture, or exploring the Indigenous languages of Taiwan. We want them to experience more than a story that has simply been translated. We want them to see how Rukai people use their own language to describe the forest, the land, and the work of restoration.
Combinations of Chinese, English, and German can serve different language-learning environments. The same story can offer different ways of reading and listening, depending on the learner’s main language and target language.
We are also developing a series of teaching materials to accompany the picture book, with the hope of eventually offering workshops for teachers.
With these stories, teachers can guide children in language learning while also introducing forests, ecosystems, and sustainability through the same narrative.
From the picture book into the classroom
Before leaving Taiwan for further study abroad, I completed part of a teacher education programme.
That training left me with a lasting conviction: teaching material cannot be considered complete simply because it looks complete to its designer. It has to enter a real classroom and be tested by children and teachers.
So I used my visit to Taiwan as an opportunity. I took the picture book and the materials that were still in development to the first school and taught the lesson myself.
It was the first time I had stood in front of a group of children and told a story using a picture book I had created.
The version I brought into the primary classroom was not the Rukai edition. It was the Chinese and English edition.
That version had two main teaching purposes.
First, the combination of story, images, and interactive questions was designed to create a more immersive listening experience. Teachers could choose either Chinese or English as the main language of the lesson, while the other language became a scaffold for understanding the story and checking meaning.
Second, the story introduced one practical method of forest restoration. Language learning did not have to remain at the level of vocabulary and sentence patterns. It could also carry new knowledge.
The Chinese text had originally been written for children of about five. In Taiwan, however, English is not the main language children use in daily life. Even older children need guidance before they can gradually enter a complete story in English.
I did not expect them to understand every English sentence from the beginning. Instead, I designed an interactive reading approach in which the pictures, the voice, and the situation of the story all served as clues.
I read the English first, then asked the children to use the images and the unfolding story to guess the meaning in Chinese. I also encouraged them to identify and say aloud any English words they had heard.
Children do not need to know every word before they can take part in a story.
They can begin by looking, listening, and making guesses. As the story continues, they can gradually test and refine their understanding. In this way, English listening becomes more than an exercise in finding the correct answer. It becomes part of how the story is understood.
What do children already know?
In the classroom, I tried to avoid a one-way lecture. Instead, I used a sequence of questions to invite the children to study the pictures, predict what might happen, and share their own thoughts.
One question was:
“What might happen if there were fewer trees in the mountain forest?”
Their response was livelier than I had expected.
One child said that animals would lose their homes. Another thought the air would become worse. Someone else mentioned that rain might wash the soil away.
The children built on one another’s answers. Taken together, their ideas already formed a remarkably detailed picture of what the loss of a forest could cause.
I was surprised and delighted. The children had clearly accumulated a great deal of knowledge about forests and the environment.
Then I asked another question:
“If the trees on the mountain disappeared, how could we help the forest grow back?”
This time, they had fewer ideas.
They understood the problems caused by the disappearance of a forest, but they did not necessarily know how forest restoration works in practice.
That became one of the most important findings from the lesson.
Through books, school, or everyday life, children may already understand the consequences of environmental damage. What they often lack is a concrete picture of how people repair damaged environments and what steps forest restoration actually requires.
That is precisely where this story can continue to help.
After the first classroom trial
By the end of the lesson, the children had practised English listening and learned about one method of forest restoration.
For me, this was more than the completion of a storytelling activity. It was the first genuine test of whether the picture book could become a teaching tool.
Could the children follow the story?
Even without understanding every English word, could they build meaning from the pictures, the voice, and the plot?
Which questions opened a discussion?
Which ideas still felt too abstract?
Could the language learning and the knowledge of sustainability truly be connected through the same story?
Questions like these only begin to find answers once the material enters a real classroom.
The lesson also helped me see more clearly that different language editions can serve different purposes.
An edition that includes Rukai can offer an entry point into the language, its cultural perspective, and local knowledge.
When the Chinese and English edition enters a Taiwanese primary classroom, it can create a story-led listening experience in either language while introducing the practical process of forest restoration.
The same book is not merely translated into several languages.
Depending on the language combination, the learning environment, and the learners themselves, it can become a different kind of educational tool.
After the lesson, I began asking myself another question:
What if the class did more than tell children that forest restoration matters? What if it helped them see, feel, or even understand with their own hands how a forest forms and how it can disappear?
Not long afterwards, I was invited to teach at a second school.
This time, I decided to make some changes.