🎉 Join Dr. Diane on the Adventures in Learning Podcast, where wonder, curiosity, and connection guide our exploration of the world. In today's episode, we meet picture book author June Smalls, whose latest release, They Lead: The Wolf Pack, is captivating readers of all ages. From the depths of the animal kingdom to the joyous play of wildlife, June Smalls shares the inspiration behind her stories, packed with social-emotional learning, animal adaptations, and beautiful illustrations.
Show Notes:
Resources:
Subscribe, download, and embark on an adventure of learning with the Adventures in Learning Podcast.
Read the full show notes, visit the website, and check out my on-demand virtual course. Continue the adventure at LinkedIn or Instagram.
*Disclosure: I am a Bookshop.org. affiliate.
🎉 Join Dr. Diane on the Adventures in Learning Podcast, where wonder, curiosity, and connection guide our exploration of the world. In today's episode, we meet picture book author June Smalls, whose latest release, They Lead: The Wolf Pack, is captivating readers of all ages. From the depths of the animal kingdom to the joyous play of wildlife, June Smalls shares the inspiration behind her stories, packed with social-emotional learning, animal adaptations, and beautiful illustrations.
Show Notes:
Resources:
Subscribe, download, and embark on an adventure of learning with the Adventures in Learning Podcast.
Read the full show notes, visit the website, and check out my on-demand virtual course. Continue the adventure at LinkedIn or Instagram.
*Disclosure: I am a Bookshop.org. affiliate.
[00:01] Dr. Diane: Wonder, curiosity, connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr. Diane and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures in Learning. Welcome to the Adventures in Learning podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Diane, and today we are talking to picture book author June Smalls. Her book They Lead: The Wolf Pack just came out, but she's also got some amazing, wonderful books that I can't wait for her to share with you. I met her when she wrote Odd Animal ABCs and she brought it to the children's museum where I was working at the time. But since then she's written This Cat Loves That; She Leads: The Elephant Matriarch; He Leads: Mountain Gorilla, the Gentle Giant; and of course, most recently, They Lead: The Wolf Pack. June, welcome to the podcast.
[00:49] June: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:51] Dr. Diane: I am so excited to have you here. I noticed when I was looking at your website that you have this tagline that sort of resonated for me, great stories live here and I wanted to ask you about that and maybe just start with what does that mean to you?
[01:07] June: I think we all have a story to tell and we all have our own personal stories and hopefully those of us that are writing are writing great stories. So it just felt right.
[01:20] Dr. Diane: Well, I think it's wonderful. So let's talk a little bit about They Lead. Share your new book. What's it about and how can teachers use it?
[01:31] June: So They Lead is the third in the lead series and it is about the wolf pack, the grey wolf in North America. Primarily all three books are straight nonfiction, but they have a lyrical storyline that can be told to the younger readers or if you only have a few minutes in class or you just got some wiggle fidgets and they're not going to sit through the whole thing and that's fine too. But then each spread has nonfiction sidebars so that you can dive in a little bit more. So the lyrical story is just a brief little overview, but then you can see how much food they eat and how they live and how the mates raise their young and all three in the series. So She Leads: The Elephant Matriarch is about the female leader. And so that one focuses on her intelligence, her caring, how she teaches and cares for and protects her group, her family unit. Then with He Leads: Mountain Gorilla, the Gentle Giant; that is the male leader. And a lot of people think that gorillas are just these big, tough, strong things, but they will avoid conflict in order to protect their family. That's why they're so hard for us to study. We can't find these giant couple of hundred pound creatures because they're so good at hide and seek and they're so gentle with the young. And I watched a video of one kind of hanging out with a young owl that had just kind of fluttered down from the nest and he was poking it, but so gentle. That giant creature could have crushed this little owl. And bird bones are hollow, but he was just curious and poking it and gentle, and they're so sweet and shy. So it's both the strong I will protect and the soft side of the male and then obviously, the teamwork in the wolf pack. So alphas are a misnomer. That was when humans created a pack to study rather than how they naturally occur. They naturally occur with boy meets girl, girl meets boy. They join up and create a family. And so they are just a traditional family unit. And sometimes they'll adopt other individuals or other small groups if there's plenty of food to go around. But mostly they're all related. So it's just different leaderships in different scenarios. And it's a great way to introduce the concept of leadership and what makes a good leader in a totally non political way. Because elephants teaching you where a waterhole is isn't about beliefs, it's just what they do. They say, oh, our waterhole is dry, I will show you where another waterhole is further away. So it just shows basic good leadership skills and ways that they can be applied in your classroom or at home, and then different family structures. Elephants are pretty much all females living together. The males go off on their own nature's way of preventing inbreeding, while the gorilla troop is many unrelated, coming together to form a community called a troop. And then the wolf pack obviously is almost the very traditional mom, dad and kids. So you get to see different structures and how they work and why they work in those environments, and that there's no one right way to be. There's just different things that work in different scenarios.
[05:10] Dr. Diane: So it sounds like you've packed an awful lot into these books. There's social emotional learning, there's the animal adaptations, the animal structure, the nonfiction piece of it, the beautiful illustrations and the lyrical story. How do you go about sort of deciding what you're going to put into a book and what you're going to leave out? Because I imagine there's a lot of research that goes into these.
[05:33] June: Oh, so much research. So much research. But that's the fun part. I'll even just keep Nat Geo and Animal Planet documentaries on in the background while I'm writing these things, just in case. Like, oh, I like that, why’d they do that. And I've gone to zoos and interviewed zookeepers. I actually got to touch an elephant. I got to touch the top of her head and her tusk. And that was pretty cool. With a zookeeper in a totally safe, structured environment, I would never go up to a wild animal. I don't want to be on the news for a bad reason.
[06:10] Dr. Diane: Understood.
[06:11] June: But it's so cool to talk to scientists and so many people are willing to say, hey, yeah, I'll give you a few minutes of my time. Or shoot me an email. Or She Leads: The Elephant Matriarch was actually vetted by the Amboseli Elephant Trust in Africa. I said, hey, a lot of my sources are like, ten years old or older. Can you make sure I got the most up to date information? And the book is shorter than this email. And they were like, absolutely. Send it down, and we'll take a look and correct a few things. A lot of people with the knowledge are willing to share the knowledge with us writers. And then I just got blessed that the illustrator, Yumi Shimokawara, is ridiculously fantastic.
[06:56] Dr. Diane: I was going to say the illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. Do you want to share a favorite page or a favorite part from one? I know I'm asking you to pick your favorite child.
[07:10] June: It's so hard. But I think in most of the books, I love the play portions that I put in. So while living as a wild animal is difficult, it's hard. There's lots of death and danger and bad things. But in each book, there's a spot about how the young play and how the adults are watching or even playing with them. And it's not all about survival. They just bond through play. And I love that. And sometimes it also follows up a sad part, like if one animal is lost, but then on the next page, the elephant is playing with a stick, which they do in the wild. They will play with toys, chase the birds. But I think that those joyful parts are my favorite.
[08:06] Dr. Diane: And then as you're working with your illustrator, I know that often the author and illustrator don't meet. So how do you set it up so the illustrator knows kind of what you're envisioning for the book?
[08:22] June: Dumb luck. No, not exactly. Especially with this nonfiction, we know that we're following a life cycle. When I'm talking about watering holes and traveling, I'm just giving them a general idea. For this particular one, it's Yumi, and she just rolls with it. Since it's nonfiction, they do send me the art first just so I can correct anything that could be inaccurate or add little tidbits. Like initially when I got a rough sketch, the elephant ears didn't have a ton of tears in them. But that's actually how we identify them in the wild, because from a distance, it's just a really big gray blob, and all the gray blobs look the same. But the tears that they get, some through fighting or injury, but mostly just through eating and dragging those branches by them just wears down the edges of their ears. So I was able to say, hey, can we make those a little bit more distinct and unique? And the art director says, Absolutely. We'll tell Yumi. Yumi crushed it. So you can actually follow the matriarch and see which one she is on every spread. So I don't get to be an art director. I don't get to say I would love for this to be here. This to be here. I just get to say, hey, this is accurate. Or, hey, I think one time I said, can we have a little something different here? Just because this is a big deal in the wolf life. And the art director said, we understand, absolutely. But mostly I'm just saying, hey, yeah, scientifically accurate. We had a lot of back and forth on the one where it looks like the elephant is crying. Because when an elephant is stressed, it doesn't have tear ducts. So it doesn't cry the way a human cries, but it has glands at the eye, glands on the temple, glands on the rear end that will leak when stressed. And they have been photographed and videoed appearing to cry at these bodies of dead elephants. So it's an accurate representation. But I know a lot of people get jumpy at that. So we had a lot of back and forth on that one.
[10:39] Dr. Diane: Sounds exciting. And I noticed, like, on your Fun Facts, you talked about, you have swum with sharks, you fed tigers, you met an elephant, you were bitten by an emu twice.
[10:50] June: Two different emus, two different zoos.
[10:52] Dr. Diane: Okay, please tell us about how you got bit by an emu.
[10:56] June: I think they don't like cameras. So that was just the first one, I think, was a petting zoo with my daughter on a field trip or so. It was an educational farm nearby. I shouldn't say a petting zoo. And when I pulled my camera out, he came up and I thought, oh, he's just like, shiny camera. And he bit my camera and my hand. And then virtually the same thing happened at a different zoo where it had this little area where you could feed, like, four or five different animals. And it's funny because I had it on video with my daughter saying, he's going to bite you. And I said, no, I'm just taking a quick. And then he bit me.
[11:34] Dr. Diane: And she felt really superior.
[11:38] June: Oh, absolutely. There's nothing like a tween going, I told you so. But yeah. So just a lot of that is when I was visiting zoos, and sometimes when you're doing research and you get to do a little bit more of the behind the scenes thing, it's pretty cool. She did not like when she went behind the scenes with me and one of the baby camels tried to eat her hair tie and sucked her whole ponytail in his mouth.
[12:01] Dr. Diane: Oh, my. So what's been the most kind of incredible or unexpected research trip you've done as you've been learning about the animals?
[12:12] June: I would say getting to touch the elephant was pretty cool. I was hoping I could get kind of in front of the elephant and take a picture, and he was like, Come meet her. And that was amazing. I've also met a wolf at a great distance and have a picture where she is pretty far behind me and getting to talk to great people. I did research on fusas for a book that never came to fruition. But I emailed the scientist and he said, I'm actually driving a couple of hours. Give me a call. And I'm just literally driving from point A to point B. I got hour, hour and a half of your time. So great people are cool.
[13:00] Dr. Diane: Part of it is there a bucket list place or creature that you would like to research that sort of is tickling the back of your mind or on your wish list.
[13:12] June: So my all time favorite creatures are turtles. And I almost can't write a good turtle book because I don't want to do them dirty because I just love them. They're underappreciated. People assume that they're boring and they're really cool. Sea turtles, especially are just amazing. And I would love to go see sea turtles hatch somewhere. That would be a bucket list item.
[13:43] Dr. Diane: That would be amazing. Well, very cool. So let's take a step back and let's talk a little bit about June Smalls. I like to ask people to tell us about your adventure and learning. How did you become the author that you are today? What was your story that led to this?
[14:01] June: I was always a bookworm, and growing up in the we didn't always have cable, being the youngest of four kids and two dozen or more cousins that were always all on top of each other. We didn't always have a lot of stuff, but we had a library card. And while my siblings were all great athletes, I was kind of the nerd, and I was cool with that. And I didn't really intend to be a writer. I just always liked writing and, you know, good at it in school. And I wrote for know, I wrote little scenes. And then one day I was watching a Barbie movie with my daughter and I was like, this gives me a really cool idea I should really do something with. Then, you know, within a few months, I was like, okay, I've written for to. I'm going to write for children because this is the part that gets me really excited and gets all my nerdiness happy. And I want to say that was back in 2013, because then I joined SCBWI and tried to be all professional and realized I sucked. I wrote very preachy picture books with three times the amount of words that should be there. But that's when I got started and I eased my way in. So it wasn't like my whole life I'm going to be a writer, but once I found it, it was just like this. This is what I've been missing.
[15:43] Dr. Diane: That's awesome. And are there books that influenced you, like, as a child or books that influenced you? Because I know a lot of authors I've talked to them. And it was as they were reading to their own kids, it was a new wave of picture books that sort of inspired and moved them. Were there books that sort of you went, that's what I want to do, or that inspires me, or I think they're cool,
[16:06] June: But I read Voraciously, and I have since I was little, whatever the max number of books I could carry in my scrawny little six year old arms I was carrying, and I want to say so many books that I probably don't even remember just got me excited about the next book. And then when I found the Saddle Club series, the chapter books in the just couldn't get enough of them. I had a list of which numbers I'd already read, and every trip to the library, I tried to find the ones I hadn't read and then reading to my daughter the newer stuff that was just funny, and nonfiction, that wasn't just boring, this dude did a thing on a date. And I can't say there was ever one book that changed me or that gave me a wake up, but there was every book by every author and every illustrator who just made me realize that there was more on the page than just the words. They all are tiny little grains of sand that built this up.
[17:14] Dr. Diane: And it sounds like I'm envisioning six year old June carrying all the books in her arms. It sounds like libraries were a huge part of that.
[17:20] June: As absolutely. We went for a while. I think we went every Friday and again, when my poor mother had four kids and Lord knows a random cousin tagging along and then our friends tagging along, that was a place where she could just be like, go, I'm going to sit here and read. Just go. And she got some quiet time. So I'm sure as an adult, I appreciate that differently than I did as a child. And then they had events and stuff that we could go to. So, yeah, libraries built me for sure. All right.
[17:53] Dr. Diane: I love that. And I was going to ask, you have a chance to do school visits and to sort of see how schools are engaging with your books. What have been some of the most intriguing things you've seen in terms of how people use your books in the classroom?
[18:11] June: I love that they open them for discussions once they realize, like, the leads book, it's more than just animals. What else do you see here? I love when they use it as a bridge to a different topic or a different conversation. I absolutely love when kids make art based on the book or because of the book, they wanted to draw a different animal or with OD animal. ABCs sometimes classrooms were talking about making their own list of OD animals and different ones that they found. So I love when it sparks that curiosity and then they grow beyond there. And I do have teacher guides for the lead series on my website that has social studies, math, science, art, things that are amazing that they can do, too. But I love when they surprise me. And little kids, they'll see connections that I didn't even see. They said, you have a gorilla book like the One and Only Ivan? And I'm like, yeah, I do. I have a gorilla book, too. And then they're like, and you have an elephant book, like the One and Only Ruby. And I was like, well, yeah. And they're like, and you have a wolf book, and a wolf is a dog, and the one and only Bob is a dog. And I was like, you know what? You're right. We have series that have the same things. And he's like, I figured that out on my own. And he was just so little. I think he was a second grader. But he was on it.
[19:36] Dr. Diane: He found you know, I just had Katherine Applegate on the podcast recently, and she teased the fact that there's going to be a fourth Ivan book coming out this spring. So you'll have to see what it's about. And maybe, as the little boy said, you might do a companion piece.
[19:54] June: I mean, my next one with Familius is about the honeybee. So if she's got something with there, we've accidentally got a whole thing going.
[20:02] Dr. Diane: She let me guess. But she wouldn't tell me what it's about. And I'm pretty sure it's not a bee. You might be venturing into Candace Fleming.
[20:10] June: I'm pretty sure it's not a bee.
[20:12] Dr. Diane: So that's a great transition. Then. Your next book is about a bee.
[20:18] June: The next I don't want to say it's in that series, but we continued along with that format. So we have a book in the works called They Work. So it's about the honeybee, but it's not about the queen. It is about how the worker bee does every single job in the hive. I just assumed there were bees that built and bees that forage and bees that were the ladies and waiting to the queen. But every bee from birth works its way up every single job. So that is one that we're working on. And then also I have another book out called Hear Them Roar, which is a sound book. It is straight nonfiction. It is kind of a browsable nonfiction where you get to learn about the animals, the animal's voice, what we're doing to help, because this is about 14 endangered animals from around the world. But then it also has a sound bar. And my favorite you probably can't hear it here.
[21:23] Dr. Diane: Play it one more time.
[21:24] June: That is a rhinoceros. So a rhinoceros makes these little squealy sounds, which a big tank of an animal making those little sounds is just adorable. And then we have a companion book to that one, so that's Hear Them Roar: 14 Endangered Animals from Around the World, but we're going to have Hear them Sing, which is about songbirds that you can see in North America in your own backyard, but that'll be a while yet.
[21:54] Dr. Diane: Those both sound incredible. So how do you find your inspiration?
[22:00] June: Well, since most of what I do is animals and there's a bajillion different kinds of animals, I never run out of cool things to research and look at. And I love facts, I love new things. I love in the bird book and I'm like, oh, cardinals help rebuild forests because they hide healthy acorns and just dumb. I don't want to say dumb, but just silly little facts that maybe the world doesn't care about. But they just excite me because it's like everything is cool if you're willing to look at it and really learn about it. And then just the kids I meet, they're like, okay, you have to write about this. And I'm like, you know what, that's actually a really good idea.
[22:38] Dr. Diane: That's wonderful. So last question for today. What brings you hope?
[22:46] June: Love. Kids love everything and they love big they have big feelings. So they're excited when I come into a classroom and maybe it's because I'm getting them out of their history assignment, but mostly they're just excited and they love everything and they're so willing to absorb the world around them. And that gives me hope because if they can hold on to those joyous feelings and that excitement for life and that excitement for learning, even if they say, hey, yeah, I don't like this, but I love this. Okay, well then you like learning. These are just your favorite topics. So that gives me hope that these kids are just so smart from such a young age and sometimes we don't give them the credit. They are observant and amazing. So that gives me hope.
[23:40] Dr. Diane: Wonderful. Well, thank you for joining us today on the Adventures in Learning podcast, folks. I'm going to be dropping some resources in the show notes so that you'll be able to see all of June Small's books as well as the really cool educator resources that she has. And I encourage you to run out and get a copy of They Lead. Thanks for joining us.
[24:00] June: Thank you so much for having me.
[24:15] Dr. Diane: You've been listening to the Adventures in Learning podcast with your host, Dr. Diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, download and let us know what you think and please tell a friend. If you want the full show notes and the pictures, please go to drdianadventures.com. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.