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.

Introduction to Strategies for Reading Comprehension

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.

Getting to the Point!

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.

Remembering the Important Bits

“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.

How Things Go in Order

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.

Why Things Happen

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.

What’s Different and What’s the Same

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.

What Might Happen Next

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.

What’s Different and What’s the Same

Hawker Brownlow Digital

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