Rescue Dogs and Social Emotional Learning
While "We Love Nacho" is intended to be a fun loving book for kids to read with their parents or teachers, there are many layers to it.  I wanted to focus on some of the social emotional issues of being anxious, nervous and lonely.  I know that humans and dogs go through some of those same emotions and act out in different ways when going through these emotions.  I wanted parents/teachers to be able to talk about possible causes/solutions when these emotions arise.  I also liked the idea of kids learning about the process of selecting a dog and all that goes into bringing the dog home and learning all the responsibilities and FUN that goes along with having a dog.  I found my Sadie, aka Nacho through Lucky Dog Animal Rescue, see the link below for Lucky Dog.

The Characters

I wanted to have characters that were Guatemalan and Irish based on my friend's kids.  I wanted my students and my friends' kids to see and hear themselves in books. 
For this reason, I asked the illustrator to give them different shades of skin to represent this.  You'll also notice the different color eyes and hair color/texture each character has.  I wanted the book to represent a family of different shades of skin and who spoke more than one language, in this book it's English and a little Spanish.

About the illustrations...

Line Drawing

Amy worked with Nomrota, who she found on Fiverr.com.  Nomrota used Amy's words to draw a sketch and then shared to confirm that this was the vision.

Flat

After giving some feedback Nomrota added the collar, leash, changed the paper tablet to an electronic tablet and added the word "adopted" to the stack of pictures of the dogs who were already adopted.

Final Illustration

This is the end result that made it into the book.

The real life characters from "We Love Nacho"...

Amy chose to use her dog Sadie as the main character also known as (aka) Nacho.  The two other dogs featured are her sister's dogs, Ted aka, Calabaza and Abby aka Pepita.  Click the link below for the book.
Ted aka Calabaza
Abby aka Pepita
Sadie aka Nacho

To make the book Amy used the following...
I used the notes page on my phone originally to get my thoughts together.  Then I typed out my manuscript to give to the illustrator who I found on Fiverr.com.  I used YouTube to learn how to format the book on Photoshop and then used Kinde Direct Publishing to self-publish and distribute on Amazon. As I continued my self-publishing journey I used Canva to create the coloring and activity book and to format the hardcover books which I published through IngramSpark making them a little more widely available.