A CARS & STARS Online parent account means parents can keep on top of their child’s reading progress instantly, from any device. It’s just like having full access to their classroom teacher at any time, because parents can look directly at what their child is doing and see constant updates on their results and progress.
CARS & STARS Online offers a student experience that is unparalleled in its ease and scope. Students using the program have nothing to worry about beyond how to get the best out of it and themselves, and this simplicity and ease of use is an important part of how the program helps to make every student’s reading journey extraordinary.
Summarising is the last of the twelve main reading strategies that underpin the CARS & STARS Online reading comprehension program. Demonstrating the ability to summarise an entire text shows that a student has understood it at a high level, but also illustrates that they are not distracted by what is not important within it and can distil their understanding to its most essential parts.
Reading figurative language requires a more developed level of reading comprehension because it involves a student not simply understanding what is directly stated but moving to thinking in a more abstract and complex way. For this reason, the skill of being able to interpret figurative language is a vital one for any advanced reader, and as such it makes up one of the twelve main reading strategies that underpin the CARS & STARS Online reading comprehension program.
Questions about Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences move students from a direct, lower-order level of thinking about texts read to a more indirect, higher-order level of thinking, where meaning is derived not simply from what is explicitly stated but from critically and imaginatively engaging with a text to think about the story and events beyond those presented in it.
CARS & STARS Online reading comprehension program provides an overview of class success that printed books just can’t match while also delivering results much more quickly than any teacher using old-fashioned textbooks could hope to achieve. CARS & STARS Online contains all the content from the printed version of the program in addition to many benefits and features that are unique to the digital platform.
Read Aloud, a new feature of CARS & STARS Online, can revolutionise understanding. Instead of reading the text directly themselves, students listen to the program read it for them. This offers new opportunities for comprehension of stories and ideas presented, in a way unaffected by reading difficulties.
Whereas once a parent may have had to wait for scheduled interactions with their child’s teacher to really get a good grasp of how their child was faring at school, CARS & STARS Online offers unprecedented ways for parents to be informed of and involved in their child’s education – from anywhere and at any time.
The sequence in which ideas are presented in a text is one of the first things students must be able to ascertain in order to be able to fully derive meaning from it, and so the notion of Understanding Sequence is a crucial factor in reading comprehension and one of the 12 central reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online.
The ability to recall facts and details in a reading passage illustrates that the student has been paying attention, but also that they have gone some way to understanding what they have read before they have been asked to reflect on it further. This is therefore an important part of reading comprehension and one of the 12 reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
CARS & STARS Online is built on the core belief that no student learns exactly the same way or at exactly 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.
CARS & STARS Online is devoted to progress monitoring, a process that uses frequent and repeated testing of the same skills and concepts. Frequent formative testing in this way allows teachers to make quick judgements about the effectiveness of their instruction as a built-in part of the program, as students progress from Pretest to Benchmark to Post-test.
Data-gathering and utilisation, at the forefront of modern educational practice, are also at the forefront of the CARS & STARS Online program. Ongoing, accurate and transferable data collection at every stage of instruction and assessment allows the teacher to have a total picture of their class and individual students at any time, allowing instant identification of students requiring specialised care or instruction, and making differentiation a constant and ongoing process for every class rather than an afterthought.
A central plank of the twelve reading strategies taught in CARS & STARS Online is the development of the ability in students to not just be more fluent readers, but more discerning ones as well. With CARS & STARS Online, students will become informed and literate consumers of media – better able to see through the hokum and distinguish the truth for themselves.
