This presentation provides a model for teaching illustration students how to create children’s media with children instead of for children developed for the course, "The Narrative Art of the Picturebook," at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. It will detail a method of critiquing picturebooks in a nursery school setting adapted from Megan Dowd Lambert’s Whole Book Approach and share examples of how children’s feedback shapes student work. This pedagogical method demonstrates how children can provide creative insights that traditional studio critiques preclude. Most crucially, this presentation reframes the prevailing model that positions children as passive recipients of visual media, and instead situates them as capable co-creators by applying Marah Gubar’s “kinship” model to the picturebook illustration process. It urges instructors of children’s illustration to use collaborative testing as a tool to foster more reciprocal relationships between students and the children for whom they illustrate.