About the Author/Illustrator - Boyd Otter

Boyd's career began in photography, writing, painting, illustrating and working with kids, and he's continued to work in those areas ever since. He has enjoyed telling stories through various creative mediums, while always having a young audience eager to hear them.

"The kids I worked with greatly enjoyed hearing stories, and my boys insisted that I tell a new one every night at bedtime. Doing that for many years, as well as working stories into our daily homeschool routine, gave me a lot of practice! A favorite theme for my boys were stories of wild and silly things I got myself into when I was their age. It is from those stories Otter Boyd was born.

Otter essentially represents me as I was, in appearance, personality and behavior, but Otter's antics and predicaments are often much more extreme, exaggerated and outlandish.Whenever the boys needed some encouragement, a lesson, or a boost in confidence, Otter could appear in a story to help. In spite of Otter's small size, and the mischief he got himself into, he could overcome many challenges. A lesson the boys took from Otter stories is that if such a little and mischievous boy could overcome shortcomings with sheer determination, then with their greater size, strengths and good sense they could prevail too."

Since boys often need some extra encouragement to take an interest in reading, Boyd began writing and illustrating stories to specially reach kids who most enjoy stories of adventure, roughhousing, mischief, silliness and humor.

"In the school-based programs I worked, classroom teachers often struggled to get boys to take interest in quiet classroom activities such as reading, playing board games, working on artwork or crafts. The issue has become a serious concern in North American schools as boys have been falling behind academically, and their reading and writing levels have been in decline for decades.

The boys I worked with loved their physical activities, gym time, recess etc, but often became bored and stressed with activities requiring extended periods of quiet focus. Typically, my role was to organize and run activities for boys to run off steam. As that role evolved I began creating ways to take the elements that most appealed to boys in their active physical play, and incorporated them into quiet classroom activities too. This helped the boys feel that playing a board game, doing artwork, crafts, listening to a story or reading, was naturally relatable to them and fun as other activities they enjoyed.

This is what I'm trying to accomplish with writing stories, the Otter character, and with this website too. The short and easy to digest posts here are created to entertain, and at the same time aim to stimulate a little bit of reading, imagination, creativity, interests and awareness. I hope that some homeschoolers, teachers and families might discover Little Otter Tales, enjoy the resource I'm creating for kids, and use the content in whatever way they feel will be of most value to their kids and classrooms."

Boyd has set Otter's story in the early 1900s because, as he says, “kids had a lot more freedom back then, and with that greater freedom they could have bigger adventures and make incredible mischief!”

Boyd also likes the first half of the 20th century for its wealth of talented illustrators and comic strip creators.

"Otter's story is nearly completed. Now my focus is on developing illustrations best suited to the characters and time period. Creating the paintings, illustrations and comic strips for this website is an opportunity to experiment and practice until I achieve an illustration style and consistency that I'm satisfied with."

Homeschools and Classrooms

A small group of homeschool and traditional school classrooms in Western and Northern Europe have shown special interest in Otter's posts as a means to introduce glimpses of Canadian life, Native culture, nature and English language to their students. Some of the posts here are specially created at the request of those educators.

Some of the younger students have grown to consider Otter as a long distance friend in their classroom. They follow Otter's activities through his postings and look forward to hearing occasional updates about where he has been and what he has been doing. It is a great pleasure and fun to create posts, artwork, photos etc, specially for those long distance friends.

If you're a homeschool or traditional classroom educator you are welcome to make use of the site and content with your students. If you would like to see any particular topics, themes or material included in future posts please let Otter know.

Otter is a busy little guy but always likes to help and will be happy to consider doing a special custom post in the theme or topic you're interested in. He also enjoys helping to do special announcements, acknowledgements and personal birthday greetings for his long distance friends. Just let us know what you'd like to see in your homeschool or class and we'll try to help. Reach us today through the Contact page.

I hope you will enjoy the site! If you like what you see and would like to support the work please look for the little blue cup at the bottom of pages. There you can treat Otter to a hot chocolate. Any support is very much appreciated!