Even the youngest student has a storehouse of knowledge and experiences they’ve built up over their short lives, be it from personal experience or from things they’ve read, seen or listened to before. By connecting new learning to this prior knowledge – and letting them see how new things can inform old, and vice versa – we engage students with their learning in a more rewarding way, while also demonstrating to them how learning is an ongoing process rather than something that stops at a predetermined goal.
This skill is particularly important in reading comprehension. While this can seem to involve merely observing new textual content and evaluating it, activating and engaging prior knowledge with what we read – and using that prior knowledge as a springboard for new and exciting concepts and ideas – can activate enthusiasm and higher-order thinking like lighting the fuse on a rocket can create a bang. Often this process is the difference between lower-order, rote processing and the higher-order, truly engaged thinking that is required for a highly competent reader.
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 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 that require the engagement of prior knowledge such as Identifying Author’s Purpose, Making Predictions, Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences, and Interpreting Figurative Language. 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.
CARS & STARS Online uses new concepts and ideas to engage prior knowledge and build advanced understanding – and carry it through to all aspects of becoming an expert reader.
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.
