South Hillsborough Library
South Hillsborough Library
Katherine Roy is fascinated by the animals on our amazing planet, and she loves science, history, and big adventures. As a result, the books she has written and illustrated provide children with tons of information--about the animals she has learned about as well as the ways we can protect them. She begins every story by reading extensively, traveling to interesting locations where she speaks to scientists in the field, and then returning to her studio to create the story and illustrations. She likes to think of herself as a translator who transforms “detailed information into words and pictures, as beautifully and accurately as possible.” Ms. Roy visited South on Thursday, October 19th to talk about her latest book How to be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild. South students in second and third grade listened to her and saw her video from Africa from 8:40 to 9:10, and students in fourth and fifth grade heard her speak about her work from 9:15 to 10:00.
Ms. Roy shared that from the time she was a little girl, she has loved and been fascinated by elephants. She got the opportunity to visit Kenya and study elephants through a bit of luck (the passenger sitting next to her on a plane made an all important introduction by email!). Her new book shows readers how close humans are socially to elephants, from the loving family that raises an infant to the lessons that must be learned over a period of years. Students were fascinated by the video footage she took in Kenya, and learned how to tell a bull elephant from female elephants (bulls have a curved forehead, a curved back, tremendous size, and bigger tusks). They also learned how elephants are tranquilized in order to place tracking collars around their necks, allowing scientists to learn more about their behaviors and to advocate for important protections for them. She pointed out that elephants are an umbrella species, one in which an entire ecosystem depends upon. Finally, Ms. Roy took students through her creative process, from the tiny post-it size images she draws initially in order to determine key story points to the gorgeous, final, digital watercolor drawings. It was amazing to see the staggeringly large pile of her notes, revisions, and drawings--an incredible amount of work to create an incredible book.
In addition to writing and illustrating How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild, Ms. Roy has written and illustrated Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California’s Farallon Islands, for which she received a Robert F. Sibert Informational Honor Award. She is currently working on Otis and Will Discover the Deep: The Record-Setting Dive of the Bathysphere by Barb Rosenstock and Making More, a book about reproductive biology in the natural world.
To learn more about Ms. Roy and see her amazing illustrations, visit her website.
Also, make sure to check out the informative interview with Ms. Roy that appeared in School Library Journal (July 2017).
Katherine Roy--Using Art to Educate and Astound
Sunday, October 1, 2017