Breakthrough to Meaning: Helping Your Kids Become Better Readers, Writers, and Thinkers

I especially liked the emphasis on teacher demonstration and how teachers challenged children to broaden their perspectives and to develop an understanding of other points of view.
–Carol Avery

What if there were a single literacy strategy that helped learners of all ages across all contexts read critically, write reflectively, think deeply–and, yes, even improve their performance on standardized reading and writing assessments? There is. It’s called the subtext strategy, and in Breakthrough to Meaning, you’ll find out how it can help children improve in virtually every aspect of their learning.

The power of the subtext strategy is its ability to use numerous entryways into learning–including not only reading and writing but also art and drama–to bridge the multiple literacies kids bring to school and the demands of conventional print. It’s a fresh, manageable way to work depth and breadth into literacy instruction while building students’ skills and abilities in important areas such as critical literacy, reading and writing narratives or persuasive essays, media literacy, and standardized testing.

Jerome C. Harste is a well known author of children’s books, such as It Didn’t Frighten Me and My Icky Picky Sister (Willowisp Press). Harstes’s research has focused on what young children know prior to coming to school. Together with Carolyn Burke and Virginia Woodward, their book Language Stories & Literacy Lessons (Heinemann) received the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1987.