We’ve all been there. Someone tells us a fantastic story that’s so detailed and so plausible it’s hard to believe it’s not true. Then they reveal they’ve just been pulling our legs – everything they’ve said was made up. In most instances, we enjoy the joke because the story was so good. After all, a story can be fun even though it’s entirely concocted. But what about scenarios where stories aren’t just invented to entertain but to change minds, and where it’s actually important to be able to distinguish the truth from fiction?
For all sorts of reasons, it’s important to be as good as we can be at weeding out falsehoods and identifying facts from lies (or just what people want us to think). It’s never been more essential in this digital age where news and information are thrown at us from every angle, but with little regard to accuracy or even the reliability of the sources they have come from.
This is where CARS & STARS Online comes in. A unique and sophisticated online reading program that teaches children to become better readers through the research-proven application of reading strategies, the program’s basic structure is geared toward helping students and children become the kind of readers who can easily – and effortlessly – evaluate a text to determine if it is fact or fiction.
Being able to look at information and think about the reasoning that led to its creation – and whether it is a verifiable fact, or a story slanted by the agenda of those providing it – is an important life skill, and so one of the twelve reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
Questions on the strategy of Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion in the program ask students to determine which statements in a piece are factual statements – based on verifiable fact – and which are opinion statements – expressing a person’s biases or personal judgements instead. Students will operate on the knowledge that while facts can be proven, opinions cannot, even though they may be expressed as if they are definitive statements. This is an important skill for any reader to master – especially those concerned with identifying facts from fiction.
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.
