Learning to read can be a difficult task, but teaching someone to read can be another thing entirely. Learning to decode letters and sound out words are one thing, but neither skill really assists in the most important aspect of reading – that of comprehending what one reads, of being able to understand what something is saying rather than just being able to read it as text.
Understanding text in this way has often been something students have been expected to just pick up on their own – or something that will develop as the ability to decode the text on a literal level does. One reason why this might be the case is because understanding is such a nebulous concept – we can tell students can read something if they can read it to us, but we can only really determine whether they understand it fully with some much more in-depth work.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension.
The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
The twelve reading strategies progress from simpler, lower-order thinking skills such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details to more complex, higher-order concepts such as Identifying Author’s Purpose and Summarising. Initial questions determine students’ mastery of the text at a literal level, while later questions build on this understanding to get to the heart of their conceptual understanding. In this way, in every reading passage across every reading level, students are being asked to perform the same essential tasks – with their difficulty and complexity increasing as the student progresses through the reading levels.
These research-proven strategies, taken together, offer a complete recipe for increased student awareness of textual features and concepts, and provide a direct and understandable pathway to improving reading comprehension for each and every student.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
