Vicki Whiting

Curious questions from her third-grade students sparked Vicki Whiting’s career in publishing. She’s the author of Fox Chapel’s new “Totally Awesome Activity Books” – A Kid’s Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals and Mind-Boggling Animal Puzzles, created with her illustrator for 20 years, Jeff Schinkel. These books grew out of a long history of creating exciting learning activity materials for children, originally published in hundreds of newspapers.

“I’m a curious kid at heart,” she admits. “I love doing new and unusual things.” As a young teacher years ago, Vicki discovered that standard reading materials weren’t helping her struggling readers. So she created fun puzzles with “secret codes” that that helped them decode words. She turned dry textbook information into a game, a word search, fun facts, mazes or a puzzle, and the children began to love reading.

The key moment that led to professional publishing happened when she was teaching the required unit on “Community.” Vicki found the required textbook boring and generic. She asked her students, “How can we learn about our community?” The kids responded: our community newspaper! So, one day after school, she sat down at her kitchen table and created a newspaper-size page of puzzles and games on the theme of “our community.” She took her prototype to her local newspaper, the Sonoma Index-Tribune in California. She explained to the editor that her school children were part of the Sonoma community, and a page in the weekly would help them find out about it.

The newspaper editor loved the idea of children reading the weekly newspaper for their page titled “Kid Scoop.” The initial weekly page featured puzzles, games, plus reading and writing activities on the “community” theme and a scavenger hunt that guides the young readers ages 7-12 to other parts of their hometown newspaper.

Vicki “tested” the first page on “community” with her own two growing boys who noticed it on the kitchen counter and pronounced it “Cool!”

Each week, the Kid Scoop newspaper page tackles something children hear floating around them but don’t understand – for example this kid’s question: “Why do we get a shot when we aren’t sick?” The topic for that Kid Scoop page: vaccinations.

Her materials for children are informed by educational standards for each subject area, including STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), fact and opinion, history, and geography activities. She mentions that her mother was also a teacher, and her late father was chief scientist at NASA early on. Her passion for learning all subjects infuses each page of her work.

“My greatest joy is writing,” Vicki says. “I love it when adults tell me they learned some ‘factoid’ from the page, and when teachers tell me ‘this was written by a teacher’ – because I always imbed ‘teachable moments’ in the fun activities.”

Becoming an entrepreneur-writer was not easy, she says. “I learned along the way, got into and out of debt, and ultimately got into a good business coaching program that helped me keep my staff employed even during the Great Recession. I guess I just have stubborn perseverance and a high tolerance for risk. The products keep me going because I love creating them.”

Nearly 30 years later, Kid Scoop appears in more than 300 newspapers with a combined circulation of 7.5 million, nationally and internationally, in newspapers as far away as Thailand. Her web site is www.kidscoop.com and has a section for parents to use at home. Vicki is also creator of Kid Scoop News, a monthly newspaper for children, with 18,000 copies sent each month to 400 schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many sponsors underwrite the deliveries to teachers who sign up.

Vicki also consults with newspaper publishers on the topic of developing youth readership and educational partnerships. She has written curriculum materials for the New York Times, Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in addition to numerous educational publishers.

Illustrator Schinkel was drawing “all the time!” as a child and attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Jeff was creating illustrations directed at youth and published in the Oakland (CA) Tribune newspaper where Vicki noticed his work and hired him 20 years ago.

Now Vicki and Jeff have brought their creativity to Fox Chapel Publishing. The Mind-Boggling Animal Puzzles activity book gives children 72 pages of fun facts, puzzles, games, mazes, and word searches. A Kid’s Guide to Drawing Cartoon Animals activity book shows children step-by-step how to draw 28 animals.

The books include updated pages from the thousands of Kid Scoop pages in the archive created by Vicki and Jeff over the years. David Miller, Fox Chapel publisher of its imprint, Happy Fox Books, says Fox Chapel’s mission is to help children learn by doing and have fun at the same time. And there are more activity books from Vicki and Jeff to come!