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 entered directly into the software, and results being instantly recorded and corrected automatically, requiring no teacher marking.
CARS & STARS Online is built on the core belief that no student learns the same way or at the same pace, and this knowledge informs the whole program – making it one built on differentiation as its central concept, rather than something added later to complement existing, more rigid instruction.
What this means, in practice, is that students work at the level of their understanding, rather than year level, and teachers can teach multiple levels of comprehension in the same class at the same time.
So, what do you do when your students have finished all their activities in CARS & STARS Online ahead of time, when you need extra things for them to do while other students continue working, or when you just want to give them extra practice?
One useful feature of the twelve main reading strategies that CARS & STARS Online is built upon is that they are readily relatable to all content, not just the activities in CARS & STARS Online. This, after all, is why they are useful and embody a way of thinking about text that will set readers in good stead for the rest of their reading lives.
One common activity with students needing extra practice beyond CARS & STARS Online is to get them to read other books and apply the knowledge they’ve learnt by writing summaries of the text in the style of CARS & STARS Online questions, or by having them “apply” some of the main strategies to what they’ve read to see what they come up with.
Using the strategies in this way serves to both reinforce what they’ve learned and illustrate their usefulness as a way of thinking about things in the “real world” beyond the exercises they’ve completed. This is often an important step, particularly for older students, as they might feel that they are being taught things just to keep them busy and with little real-world application.
But for those teachers needing extra content for their students, there is now another option. The FOCUS Reading module is designed to provide reinforcement in six key reading strategies for on-level readers, and targeted intervention for struggling readers and English-language learners.
FOCUS Reading can be used in high-school classes as a complementary program to provide additional practice or reinforcement in the key reading strategies, whether your students are already using the CARS & STARS module or not, but it is particularly useful in a scenario where students have already completed all their designated CARS & STARS Online work and need an extra challenge.
Each FOCUS lesson contains one reading passage, four strategy-based selected-response questions and one strategy-based constructed-response writing question. Passage Genres are both fiction and nonfiction and include personal narrative; realistic fiction; folktale; fable; legend; article; letter; book report; journal entry; biography; textbook lesson; and instructions.
The six “key” reading strategies covered are those in which students often require the most practice: Understanding Main Ideas & Details; Understanding Sequence; Recognising Cause & Effect; Comparing & Contrasting; Making Predictions; and Drawing Conclusions & Making Inferences.
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.
