Behind the Scenes at Ellii

At Ellii, there are a few lesson sections that started out as passion projects for our Publishing team members. Our Young Learner section called Picture Stories is one of these sections. You might know this section better as "Benji stories."

These stories, about an adorable bear who happens to have the same name as our founder and CEO, are written and illustrated by our in-house designer, Saori.

Saori is from Brazil and her first language is Portuguese! In the early days, Saori had a lot of help from our editor, Tanya. Over the years, while working closely with the English materials developed by our in-house writers and editors, Saori's English improved immensely, and she was able to starting writing these lessons more independently! Meanwhile, Tanya took on a new role as our head of video and began overseeing the development of Benji videos. The amazing videos have brought even more fans to this fun series!

Fan Fiction

As you can imagine, if you see how much new content we put out each month, Saori has a very busy job as the lead designer on Ellii's Publishing team. Though she doesn't have a lot of time for her passion project, Saori tries to add at least a few new Benji stories and lessons each year.

For some Benji fans, however, this is not enough! In fact, a recent young reader named Olivier (age 8) took this into his own hands and submitted his own Benji story. He asked that we publish it, so we've decided to put it on our blog.

With the World Cup coming soon, we hope your young soccer fans and early readers enjoy Olivier's Benji Soccer Story, our first "fan fiction" submission! We think Olivier got the tone just right for Benji. He even invented his own new Benji "friend" named Banjo. (Move over, Yumi and Onyx!) 

If your students love Benji and his friends, you can encourage them to write their own fan fiction and submit it below in the comment section.

Olivier is very excited that Benji has a friend Banjo. They sound like maybe they're twins. We hope you like the story and will publish it! Cheers!

~ Ezri (teacher) & Olivier

Benji Soccer Story

Hi, my name is Benji.

Today I am playing soccer with my friend Banjo.

Banjo and I like to play drums too.

My friend Banjo and I played a soccer match, and Banjo won the match 2 to 1.

We played another match, and this time I won 3 to 2.

We continued to practice soccer by doing free kicks.

After the game, we went to get pizza and played drums.

"See you next time!"

By Olivier, age 8

Oh my god, that's so sweet! 🥹 I can picture Banjo as a fluffy black bear, ha! 

~ Saori, author of Ellii's Benji Picture Stories