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A longtime San Ramon Valley educator and writer has made her first foray into elementary children’s literature, with her latest release coming on the heels of poetry and middle school literature titles amid her retirement as an educator.
Kate McCarroll Moore’s latest title “Chelsea Skye, Nature Spy” seeks to encourage children to explore the world around them in the wake of the shift to digital and online entertainment that was accelerated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic, however, Moore said that she had initially started thinking about the story while reflecting on social media posts from a friend detailing the saga of a bird who sought to nest at their home.
“About five years ago I saw on Facebook a post from someone I was friends with in high school,” Moore said. “She shared a picture of a robin that was trying to nest in her home on one of the light fixtures, and it was just the most mess of a nest you’ve ever seen. It was not a livable nest.”
Moore’s friend eventually took action to provide better accommodations for the new addition to her household, acquiring a bowl for the bird to nest in as an upgrade from the light fixture.Â
Moore said, “I saw that story and I just started wondering what would happen if you were a child and you were watching something like that occur – what would you do and how could you help in that situation?”
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the ensuing increase in screen time amid quarantines and shutdowns, Moore started adding an additional layer to her reflections on the story.
“I started thinking about all the people who are on their screens all day long, and what would a child do if everyone in their family was on their screens and they had the opportunity to go outside and become a spy,” Moore said.
The plot for “Chelsea Skye: Nature Spy” developed from there, with the picture book now on shelves after its launch on Feb. 28.
The picture book opens with the line “the year the world turned upside down” and closes with “the bird swerving off into a topsy-turvy new world,” Moore said, with the first line being a nod to 2020 and the final line being a nod to the present day.
While the plot and message of the newly released book are heavily steeped in the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moore said that she expected its lessons to continue resonating with readers in the “topsy-turvy new world” that is 2024.
“I think people are still feeling the repercussions of the pandemic for sure,” Moore said. “I read the book at Rakestraw to an audience the other day, and just when you think about instead of turning to the things online, and to screens and to all of that to be looking at the world outside your window – I think that message holds up still.”
Moore began her career as an educator with the San Ramon Valley Unified School District as a librarian at Sycamore Valley Elementary School in Danville before teaching second grade there, then going on to teach seventh and eighth grades at Charlotte Wood Middle School and finally serving as the district’s director of instruction prior to her retirement in 2020.
“I really love the way kids think, and trying to help them navigate the world,” Moore said.
In addition to writing for children post-retirement, Moore has continued to serve as a mentor to young writers and have an impact in local classrooms, continuing to advise several students in a recent online writing workshop from as far away as Hong Kong. She has also helped to implement a “poem pals” program between local students and classrooms on the other side of the country.
“At Stone Valley Middle School, two sixth grade classrooms are working with two sixth grade classrooms in Upstate New York,” Moore said. “They get a small piece of text and then they use all the words in that to create poems with.”
While Moore had numerous sources of inspiration for “Chelsea Skye” she noted that a lesson she’d learned as San Ramon Poet Laureate for three terms from 2012 to 2018 was that an invitation, rather than a jolt of inspiration, could be the driving force behind a writing project.
“When you’re the poet laureate, you’re asked to write a poem at the drop of a hat,” Moore said. “So I realized that you don’t need to wait for inspiration, which I think is something I always used to think, and it’s like oh, no, somebody’s just going to invite you to write something.”
Moore said that her work as an educator and writer has been aimed at offering invitations to write, and in “Chelsea Skye” to explore the outside world, as well as emphasizing the value of reading and access to a range of literature.
“Readers are leaders, and I just think that the more experiences you can have in the world through books and understanding different people’s experiences and learning about different places and different ways of being – it just makes you a bigger and better individual I think, so keep reading,” Moore said.
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