In partner reading and guided reading, it is critically important that students read silently, rather than students or the teacher reading aloud. Silent independent reading builds students’ stamina, decoding, fluency and comprehension skills. When students - especially struggling readers - read aloud, they are so focused on the performance aspect of pronouncing all the words correctly that they don’t have the mental energy left over to focus on comprehension. Reading aloud can also cause a lot of anxiety and stress for struggling readers. And finally, when a partner is following along with a disfluent reader, that partner is forced into disfluent reading habits, with their eyes tracing back over words and phrases that their partner repeats, or being forced to read more slowly than they are capable of. To support students to read silently, STARI breaks longer texts into small chunks with frequent opportunities for discussion with the teacher or with peers. These discussions allow frequent checks for understanding. Chunks of text increase in size over the course of the curriculum, allowing students to build stamina for silent reading. Sometimes, the teacher lesson plans prompt the teacher to read aloud to students, particularly at the beginning of a unit or when introducing a new text. This is to help students “get into” the text so they are motivated to do the silent reading. And of course students read fluency passages aloud to one another. But the vast majority of the reading of novels and nonfiction texts should take place silently.

The STARI program’s philosophy is that students benefit more from learning just a few strategies, with lots of practice, rather than learning a large variety of strategies. Students are taught to use the 5 Ws as a tool for summarizing text. Summarizing is the first comprehension strategy taught, and it is used throughout each Series. It is paired with Clarifying (in Unit 1), Predicting (in Unit 2) and Questioning (in Unit 3). Additionally, students are providing prompts for summarizing text-based arguments during debate preparation and participation.

Yes. This strategy is taught during Unit 1 of each Series. Sometimes students use sticky notes to record words, sometimes they are directed to underline or write words down for clarification.

STARI teachers have reported that student absences are the single biggest challenge they face. Of course, when students are absent, they miss valuable learning time. But to mitigate the effects of student absences, we have developed lesson-by-lesson summaries for the core novel in each STARI unit, available on the SERP Download Center. When a student returns from an absence, they can read the novel summaries for the lessons they missed. While this doesn’t replace reading the text itself, the summaries will allow them to participate in the day’s discussion rather than spending class time feeling disconnected.

We have designed STARI lessons and homework so that students never have to take a book out of the classroom. In this way, fewer books are lost, and you are not relying on students having completed homework in order to participate in the discussion. However, you may choose to assign reading of different texts if you like.