Photo by Jason Lamb Photography
Megan Dowd Lambert is the author of the new book Read It Again: 70 Whole Book Approach Plans to Help You Shake Up Storytime. Her other books include Reading Picture Books with Children. She is also the president of Modern Memoirs, Inc., a publishing company based in Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to write Read It Again?
A: I created the Whole Book Approach storytime model as an outgrowth of my graduate studies on the picture book at Simmons University. After completing my degree, I was hired at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where I built on my storytime practice to develop Whole Book Approach workshops to train teachers, librarians, parents, and other caregivers over the next decade.
People who attended these trainings often asked me for recommended book lists and storytime plans, especially after I published Reading Picture Books with Children: How to Shake Up Storytime and Get Kids Talking About What They See (Charlesbridge 2015).
I resisted creating lists for many years because I thought the Whole Book Approach can work with any picture book, and my main advice for book selection was for storytime readers to share books they love so that their enthusiasm for a title is at the heart of the shared reading.
As for plans, I didn’t want to give people scripts. “The Whole Book Approach is an approach,” I would say. “There’s no one way to do it!”
With the fifth anniversary of RPBWC’s publication on the horizon, however, I decided to try my hand at creating lists and plans after all. By this time I had left The Carle and was teaching as a lecturer in children’s literature at Simmons.
Encouraged by my program director, Cathie Mercier, I’d been working on connections between the Whole Book Approach and critical literacy practices, and I was committed to diversifying reading lists and collection development through syllabus, lesson-plan, and bookshelf diversity audits.
In 2019 I signed on with an educational publisher for a project in which I would select 70 picture books (10 for each grade pre-k through 5) and write Whole Book Approach plans for each one.
Then they would create book bins for classrooms and libraries to purchase with each picture book title and a grade-level guide with the plans. I poured lots of time and my whole heart into this project, with the launch set for March 2020.
Of course, the timing could not have been worse! Just as we were launching the new book bins and plans, schools and libraries shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Storytimes ceased, or moved online, and it proved extremely challenging to get these new materials out to our target audiences.
To make a long story short, I ended up having all rights to the project revert to me so that I could come up with a new way of sharing the plans.
Q: What is the relationship between this book and your book Reading Picture Books with Children?
A: RPBWC was published in 2015 by Charlesbridge, where I’ve also published several picture books and early-reader titles. It introduces the Whole Books Approach as a co-constructive (or interactive) storytime model in which children’s responses to story, art, and design are central to the shared reading. I like to say it’s a way of reading with children, as opposed to reading to children.
The storytime plans in Read It Again are a tool for people to use for integrating the Whole Book Approach into their storytime practice. I ended up collecting all of my plans into this single volume, which I published in 2023 under the White Poppy Press imprint of my business, Modern Memoirs, Inc.
My husband and I had purchased the company in 2019, and while we primarily publish memoirs and family histories in limited print runs for writers to share with family and friends, we had begun expanding into a hybrid publishing model that enables us to sell selected books we publish, too. Read It Again fits right into this part of our business.
And, in addition to offering the 70 storytime plans, this new volume opens with a piece I wrote connecting the Whole Book Approach with critical literacy practice, and each plan provides extension activities.
Also, if readers want digital versions of the plans, we have a full compendium edition of Read It Again available for purchase as a digital book, and we also broke up the full set into individual grade-level digital books.
Q: What role did the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art play in the creation of your model?
A: The Carle was the ideal place for me to build on my graduate studies at Simmons and to launch the Whole Book Approach. The museum’s use of Visual Thinking Strategies in its gallery programming was inspirational to my own work as I adopted open-ended questions, paraphrasing, and the linking of ideas as cornerstones of my storytime practice.
Founding Director Nick Clark and founding Education Department Director Rosemary Agoglia both afforded me a tremendous amount of latitude in my work, with opportunities to travel to hundreds of sites for storytimes and trainings, regular storytime sessions at The Carle, and encouragement to document my experiences.
That documentation was invaluable to my eventual writing of RPBWC, which was also aided by support I received when The Carle nominated me for recognition as a 2009 Massachusetts Literacy Champion by Mass Literacy.
My work gained credibility and exposure through The Carle’s platform, and I am proud to say that they use the Whole Book Approach in their own programing to this day.
Q: What do you see as the importance of reading picture books with kids, and do you think kids’ relationships to picture books have changed over the years?
A: Ideally, I see the picture book form as a meeting place where interdependent words and art invite children and adults to share feelings, ideas, and questions. I’ve learned so much through my conversations about picture books at storytime, especially when I get out of the way and let children share their insights.
I truly believe that storytime can be a place of transformation and growth in which we don’t just enjoy stories and art, but also learn to listen to one another and to share of ourselves.
When I was developing the Whole Book Approach in the first decade of the 2000s, there was a fair amount of handwringing over the anticipated death of the book in the digital age. Of course, the printed book is not dead at all, but continues to be valued for what it can uniquely afford us.
In a fast-paced society dominated by digital media, the codex (printed and bound) picture book affords us opportunities to slow down and engage with their materiality—their size and shape, and production elements like jackets, gatefold pages, endpapers, die-cuts, etc.—and how these physical features contribute to a reading experience. Book design, after all, is what transforms a manuscript into a book!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am just wrapping up work on an expanded edition of Reading Picture Books with Children, which Charlesbridge will publish in fall 2025 for the book’s 10th anniversary. It will include a sampling of Whole Book Approach plans from Read It Again, as well as new introductory content.
I also have notebooks and files filled with new story ideas for young readers. My seven-book early reader series Every Day with April & Mae are my most recent children’s books, and I am mulling over where to turn next to build on those books or to introduce entirely new stories.
In the meantime, I am feeling pulled to write about my family history and faith heritage. At Modern Memoirs, I am working on a collection about my Franco and Irish American heritage, with 10 pieces completed and plans for a few more.
And, for the past year or so I’ve immersed myself in reading feminist theology and wide-ranging work on the early Christ movement. This was all sparked by travels in southern France, where I was intrigued by references to les trois Maries de la mer (the three Marys of the sea) and decided to learn more.
At this point, if I could drop everything and go to divinity school, I would! That’s not in the cards right now, but although I quite don’t know where all of this learning and exploration will take me, I am profoundly grateful for the journey.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: For more information about my work, visit www.modernmemoirs.com and www.megandowdlambert.com. And, I encourage readers to also check out the following sites for information about resisting book bans and challenges across our nation:
American Library Association/United Against Book Bans
National Coalition Against Censorship
https://www.authorsagainstbookbans.com/
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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