It’s one of the simplest and oldest ways of keeping track of important ideas and details while reading. For as long as books have existed, readers have highlighted, underlined and scribbled things they wanted to remember in their pages – even if they weren’t meant to!
Annotating text in this way helps build three key reading skills. When annotating a text, the reader:
formulates questions in response to what they are reading
analyses and interprets elements of poetry or prose
draws conclusions and makes inferences based on explicit and implicit meaning.
Showing struggling readers how to annotate text gives them useful tools to be able to interact with text and find small, immediate successes. The more students practise effective reading strategies, the more natural and like second nature they will become.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program based around the repeated application of twelve core reading strategies to make students better readers who can analyse and interpret any text at a high level of understanding. The multi-level program is designed to be entirely paper-free, with all student answers being entered directly into the software, and results being instantly recorded and corrected automatically, requiring no teacher marking.
With CARS & STARS Online, students can make annotations across the whole program as a matter of course. Throughout every reading passage, students have the option to “mark up” text. This can involve highlighting words, sentences or whole passages in a choice of several colours, the ability to add notes to this text, or a combination of both. Student annotations are saved so that students can come back to them later for any reason.
Annotation is important to readers of all levels, and as such it’s a vital part of CARS & STARS Online that’s available across every level of the program – simple, easy to use and seamless.
What’s more, these textual additions can be removed (or added to) when not relevant anymore or when they’ve been acted upon, leaving no trace and the text as good as new. Now that’s something you can’t do with a printed book!
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.
