Reading Picture Books with Children: How to Shake Up Storytime and Get Kids Talking about What They See

An in-depth exploration of the author's Whole Book Approach: a way to slow storytime down and consider children's responses to art, design, and other visual elements.
Lambert honed her new storytime style while sharing picture books at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. She began by using traditional methods but realized that she was representing a museum; she should focus on art and the notion of a book as an art form. Taking cues from the open-ended questions used by the Carle museum's docents, Lambert created a similar approach toward reading with children. With chapters devoted to trim size and orientation, jackets and covers, endpapers, typography, and more, there really is no better way to say it: Lambert delves into the "whole book." Librarians may quake at the thought of inviting so much discussion while reading stories to a large group, but Lambert calms fears with repeated (and adorable—such as the "heightful tower" of Madeline) examples from her many years of practice. She also shares tips and tricks to regain focus if a group goes awry. Traditionalists' concerns that the integrity of the story might be compromised by many interruptions are unfounded; Lambert rightly stresses that reading both the words and the art are equally important and provides ample evidence of children's increased engagement with the books being shared.
Welcome permission to shake things up, with an important acknowledgment of the art form at the core of modern storytimes.
-Kirkus Reviews


Lambert, a lecturer at Simmons College, provides a guidebook to the Whole Book Approach, a “co-constructed (interactive) storytime model centered on the picture book as a visual art form,” an approach developed at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Despite the title, the Whole Book Approach is really more child- centered than book-centered, focusing on the ways children interact with books and emphasizing their experiences of what they see and hear during a storytime rather than analyzing the text or pictures. Lambert’s thoughtful introduction discusses her own struggles with learning to decode pictures and her subsequent education in all things picture book, including layout, medium, style, etc. Chapters include overviews of trim size, jackets and covers, endpapers, front matter, typography, page design, and perhaps most helpfully, a guide to encouraging visual intelligence among children and the benefits of her approach. Resources includes tips on creating and leading Whole Book storytimes, sample questions for Whole Book storytimes, a glossary and further reading.
-The Bulletin of The Center for Children's Books 


Lambert’s Whole Book Approach challenges librarians to think differently about how they share a picture book in a group setting. It asks adult readers to value the opinions of young listeners and to engage them to become active participants as they try to make meaning of all they see and hear during a shared reading. This volume gives concrete examples and practical tips on how to do a shared reading based on the Whole Book Approach; through a conversational style and clear directions, Lambert offers support for librarians and teachers testing out new ways of engaging young listeners. The author developed this method during her graduate studies in children’s literature at Simmons College and while working in the Education Department of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. As she points out, the Whole Book Approach method of sharing picture books starts right on the title page—adults share vocabulary information about the various parts of a physical book. Lambert goes on to dedicate individual chapters to “Jackets and Covers,” “Endpapers,” “Front Matter,” “Typography,” and “Page Design” and spends a good deal of time on how to foster a child’s visual intelligence. The author’s storytime anecdotes are funny, touching, and ultimately illuminating, highlighting how this approach can open new avenues to explore with children. VERDICT An essential purchase for any educator wanting to understand and apply the Whole Book Approach in their storytimes, or for those who would like to better understand the various parts and wonders of the picture book as a unique art form.
-School Library Journal 

A new, interactive approach to storytime, The Whole Book Approach was developed in conjunction with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and expert author Megan Dowd Lambert's graduate work in children's literature at Simmons College, offering a practical guide for reshaping storytime and getting kids to think with their eyes.
 
Traditional storytime often offers a passive experience for kids, but the Whole Book approach asks the youngest of readers to ponder all aspects of a picture book and to use their critical thinking skills. Using classic examples, Megan asks kids to think about why the trim size of Ludwig Bemelman's Madeline is so generous, or why the typeset in David Wiesner's Caldecott winner,The Three Pigs, appears to twist around the page, or why books like Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express and Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar are printed landscape instead of portrait. The dynamic discussions that result from this shared reading style range from the profound to the hilarious and will inspire adults to make children's responses to text, art, and design an essential part of storytime.

Megan Dowd Lambert is an instructor at the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College, where she previously earned her master's degree in children's literature. She writes about books and parenting for the Horn Book Magazine, has sat on a Caldecott Committee, and worked at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art for many years before writing A CROW OF HIS OWN, her first picture book.

            Why do we love books so much? Why do some of us, when we’re children, drag around picture books just like stuffed animals? I had a brown monkey—straw-filled—whose hands and feet were many times mended and finally completely re-sewn by my mother. And I had Die fröhlichen Steinzeitkinder (The Stone Age Children) and Die Steinzeit-kinder in Ägypten (The Stone Age Children in Egypt) by Bertil Almqvist (published originally in Swedish). All three objects were essential to my young well-being.
            The monkey is gone—I don’t remember when he was lost—but the two books by Mr. Almqvist still stand on my shelves in remarkably good shape. They are the most tangible connection to my childhood self that I have.
            Books, like stuffed animals, are things. They’re very thingy. They have a size and a shape. They are more or less shiny, soft or hard, smooth or rough. The paper within them is glossy or matte, brilliant or warm, exciting or comforting.
            Megan Dowd Lambert shows us how valuable all this thinginess of books is for students, teachers, and parents. There is a fundamental joy in it. In the classroom and in our homes a picture book is one corner of the triangle completed by the teacher (or parent, or sibling, or friend) and the child. Each is essential. A horror (to my mind) of a modern classroom is the illuminated SMART board in a darkened room. The Very Hungry Caterpillar may look marvelous and big and glowing, but two necessary elements of good education are quite literally left in the dark: the teacher and the student. Learning is best when it comes with a personality, whether that personality is in the line of a brush, the smile of a teacher, or the question of a child.
            One way to judge the merit of a work of art is to ask whether it grows more beautiful as it grows older. Reading Picture Books with Children begins by looking at Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline. I remember my first reaction to this book: I was thrilled by that loose-painted line, by the simplicity and perfection of the drawing of Madeline herself, and by the wit of the poetry. The line, the drawing, and the poetry have only increased in beauty for me since then.
            And this idea of beauty growing over time can be true of the book, the thing itself, too. As an author, to be handed one of my own books that has been torn and taped, smudged and erased, bent and smoothed, the four corners of the cardboard cover separating like little paper pussy willows, is one of my greatest satisfactions. There, in my hand, is the story around the story, the tale of a book that has traveled from hand to hand, mind to mind, heart to heart.
            —Chris Raschka