“Summarising”, the last of the main strategies and the last episode of this podcast series, doesn’t just mean recounting the main events. It shows the relationship between details and the main idea, illustrating an ability to separate important details from supporting ones. As we show in this episode, only the best readers can truly summarise well, because they’ve understood everything in a text.

Figurative language is a type of language that uses figures of speech rather than more literal language use to be more elaborate, effective or persuasive. As we explore in this episode on “Interpreting Figurative Language”, it is regularly employed in more advanced texts as readers get older. Understanding it is an important part of being able to appreciate adult novels and poetry, among many other texts.

The strategy “Identifying Author’s Purpose” involves looking beyond what a text merely is to understand what an author hoped to achieve by writing it and discerning their point of view. In this episode we see how questions on this strategy ask a student to consider why the author wrote the passage, which involves thinking about a text as an artefact created for a specific reason and with a particular agenda.

Facts are statements that can be proven, but opinions tell what someone thinks or believes. In today’s world, the distinction is more important than ever, as explored in this episode on the next reading strategy: “Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion”. Being able to tell the difference is not just useful for reading, it can mean becoming a more engaged citizen in a world where news is more likely to come filtered through Facebook or Twitter than directly from a fact-checked primary source.

“Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences” means taking what you’ve read in a passage and making leaps to things that aren’t explicitly said. As this episode shows, it’s often the difference between simply being able to read something and really being able to understand it, and it can be the difference between really getting an idea and missing the point entirely.

Coming across an unfamiliar word in a bit of text and being able to work out what it means simply by the context in which it is used is one of the hallmarks of being a really great reader. In this episode we discuss “Finding Word Meaning in Context” and how important it is in the skillset of an emerging student reader.

When you use the strategy of “Making Predictions” you go beyond what’s just stated in a text and start thinking about what might happen next, based on what you’ve read and where things might logically go next. As we explain in this episode, “Making Predictions” is so important because it moves students from lower-order to higher-order thinking, and reading comprehension from a literal interpretation to one involving imagination.

Being able to look at two things to see how they are the same or how they are different is an important part of evaluating a text. Questions that ask you to compare or contrast usually contain key words such as ‘most like’, ‘different’, ‘alike’ or ‘similar’. In this episode we explore the strategy of “Comparing and Contrasting” and see just how these similarities and differences can inform everything we read.

In a text, a cause is something that happens, and an effect is something that happens because of that cause. In this episode, we will be exploring the strategy of “Recognising Cause and Effect” and detailing how questions about it cover the ‘why’, the ‘what happened’ or the ‘because’ elements of any piece of text.

“Understanding Sequence” is the third episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast, but you can listen to it in any order. Because text passages tell information in a specific order, or a sequence, with a beginning, middle and end, being able to reorder texts to make sense of ideas is a vital part of being a good reader. Here we explain just why, with some examples from CARS & STARS Online.

Every reading passage contains facts and details that fill in more about the main idea. Questions about facts and details will ask you about something that was stated in a passage. This second episode of the series covers the reading strategy of “Recalling Facts and Details”, with examples of how it can be used to get to grips with any text.

The main idea of a reading passage is a sentence that tells what the passage is mostly about. Questions about main idea might ask you to find what a passage is mostly about or mainly about. In this first episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast we focus on the strategy of “Finding the Main Idea” and why it’s such an important skill for a reader to be able to do.

The Hawker Brownlow Digital podcast is a limited series of 12 podcasts based on the twelve main reading strategies featured in CARS & STARS Online. This introduction explains how each episode of the podcast is designed to be short and to the point, giving you a quick overview of how reading strategies can improve reading, an introduction to the specific strategy itself and some information on the CARS & STARS Online program.