When kids are learning to read, a good teacher gives them as many tools to use. Young readers are taught to sound out words they don’t know, words and concepts are repeated, and stories are put into a form that are familiar and warm. All of these help us even as adults along with one more critical tool – context, a bigger whole than the details that support it. Context comes from the pictures that support the text, either in a kids’ book or a magazine, but it also comes from the text itself. It also happens to be something that is fading from our culture altogether in strange and chilling ways.
