Beyond Storytime: When Teachers, Authors, and Illustrators Meet

An NWP CoLab Series

May 15, 2020 – March 16, 2021

In this series

Making and Sharing Our COVID Stories, an NWP Beyond Storytime CoLab

Curated by National Writing Project

After a full year of COVID, and the overlapping pandemics of violence against Black lives and attacks on Democracy, a group of educators and writers come back together at Beyond Storytime CoLab to share and consider what we have made, why we have made it, and the stories these objects carry for ourselves and others.

Beyond Storytime, An NWP CoLab—Creating a Picture Book as a Community of Collaborators

Curated by National Writing Project

This CoLab features Writing Project colleagues—author-educator Ruth Devlin, artist-illustrator-educator Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez, and editor Amy Bauman—sharing their story of collaborating from a distance in the creation of a picture book: Ants: Across, Around, and Through.

Beyond Storytime, An NWP CoLab—Awesome Author Visits when Everyone is on Zoom

Curated by National Writing Project

This Beyond Storytime NWP CoLab features Kentucky educator Sandra Hogue and author-illustrators K-Fai Steele, Gordon C. James, Aram Kim, and Kyle Lukoff.

Beyond Storytime: Sharing Works-in-Progress to Support Young Writers in Understanding Authors’ Craft

Beyond the Storytime Livestream, Livestream

5 Posts in this Series

What is possible when children’s book authors, illustrators, and elementary educators collaborate?

In April 2020, with school buildings closed for COVID-restricted shelter-in-place, NWP Writers Council members, teachers, and children’s book authors and illustrators came together to rethink the stand-alone storytime and the traditional “author visit.” Beyond Storytime Colab was launched from this initial conversation and took the form of collaboration to discover what all these partners might do to support literacy under these new and challenging circumstances. From this beginning, the limited series was created. In each episode, participants dig into one of aspect of the work, spending time co-designing together.

At the time, episodes were live-streamed on Facebook with an online chat. But as viewers came to value the resources and approaches that were created, we have posted here as archived discussions with related resources. The materials created can support any classroom, whether face-to-face, hybrid, or remote.