Dr. Andrew Vassall didn’t set out to become a children’s book author. The Cheltenham School District educator and PA Teacher of the Year semifinalist wrote his way there through the stories his own students shared with him — and now, following a self-published debut and a 10-book deal, he’s released his second title, The Blue Crayon.
From The Black Crayon to The Blue Crayon
Vassall self-published The Black Crayon in 2012, drawing directly on relationships he’d built with inner-city students who opened up to him about difficult experiences at school and at home. The book’s success led him to build out The Compassionate Crayon Series, aimed at social-emotional learning, mental wellness, and social acceptance for young readers.
That momentum recently turned into a formal 10-book deal with Winged Publications, which will republish The Black Crayon alongside nine new titles, starting with The Blue Crayon.
Released May 22, during Mental Health Awareness Month, the new book focuses on emotional regulation and staying calm in difficult moments, paired with companion coloring books for kids and workbooks for teachers and parents — a format Vassall has built into each title in the series.
The Learning Disability That Shaped Dr. Andrew Vassall’s Path to Teaching
Vassall’s own path to writing about children’s emotional struggles started with an unspoken one of his own. Growing up between Germantown, Mount Airy, and eventually Cheltenham, he was diagnosed with a learning disability while at Glenside Elementary School — but his mother never told him.
He spent his adolescence struggling academically without understanding why, a gap that wasn’t resolved until college at Eastern University, where Dr. Andrew Vassall studied elementary education and began learning to work smarter rather than harder.
Dr. Andrew Vassall originally planned to follow his mother into medicine, but found his real calling in the classroom instead. After 11 years teaching in Philadelphia, he joined Cheltenham School District in 2015 and was named a 2023 PA Teacher of the Year semifinalist. Along the way, he earned his master’s in reading and literacy from Capella University while teaching fifth grade, later returning for his doctorate — completed in 2020.
His own experience with an undiagnosed learning disability puts him in company with other Philadelphia-area families turning personal struggle into something that helps others navigate similar ground — a throughline that’s shown up elsewhere in the region’s neurodivergence advocacy as families and educators build public work directly out of private challenges.
A Doctorate Earned Alongside His Mother’s Final Months
Dr. Andrew Vassall finished his doctorate while caring for his mother as her health declined. Near the end of his final semester, he told her she was no longer the only doctor in the family — one of their last conversations before she passed.
“Becoming a doctor will forever be one of the proudest moments of my life, and it meant everything to share that moment with my mom before she passed,” Vassall said. “I was able to connect with her in a way I hadn’t before, and that sense of relatability is the overarching message in my books.”
That message — acceptance, built from real relationship rather than distance — runs through everything Dr. Andrew Vassall has built since: the classroom, the doctorate, and now nine more books still to come. It’s the same lesson he offers every student who walks into his classroom unsure of themselves, just wrapped now in watercolor and read aloud at bedtime instead.
It’s a rare thing for a children’s book to carry that much lived experience behind it, and rarer still for the person who lived it to still be standing in front of a classroom every day, doing the work that started the whole series in the first place.
For every parent hoping to give a child the words for feelings too big to name alone, The Blue Crayon offers exactly that — gently, and with a teacher’s patience behind every page.
About Post Author
Discover more from dosage MAGAZINE
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.