Over the past several years, Sirius Thinking has been compiling an “animated interactive dictionary” which already consists of over 500 brief (15 seconds to approximately a minute) animated videos that define and explain the meaning of words experts consider it especially useful for young readers to learn. Our ever-growing series of videos features an array of silly and amusing recurring characters including a mistake-prone elephant, a trickster rabbit, a sweet but clumsy hippo, a gourmet chef goat with dozens of different ways to serve sneakers, a fashion-conscious (and fish-obsessed) bear, and many more, both animal and human.

Although all kinds of words can be and have been depicted, the Sirius Thinking Animated Dictionary excels in explaining the meaning of verbs, adverbs, and abstract nouns – words that are extremely difficult to define without the animation and audio our dictionary provides. The Sirius Thinking dictionary has been pieced together, bit by bit, through an array of diverse projects – definitions have been created to appear when eBook readers click on a word of text; to serve as “interstitial segments” in longer educational programs; and, most significantly, to be used for direct vocabulary instruction in Success for All 's preschool, kindergarten, and first grade classrooms.

Our next goal is to achieve a “critical mass” of kindergarten and first grade words. Once we do (and we're getting tantalizingly close), we plan to offer a comprehensive online and/or app-oriented animated dictionary enabling users to “look up” common words (via a custom web interface or mobile app) and expect a majority of their reasonable searches to be successful.

Also in development is an initiative to create a unique English-as-a-second-language resource by translating the narrations of our unique dictionary animations into bi-lingual texts featuring “scaffolding” in a variety of other languages, recording these translations, and using them as substitute or supplementary audio tracks. Furthermore, new audio tracks featuring “foreign” language versions of our definitions would open our Sirius Animated Dictionary to distribution in a variety of international markets.

Stay tuned!