STARI FAQs

Most middle schools use Series 1 with 6th grade, Series 2 with 7th grade, and Series 3 with 8th or 9th grades. High school students who took STARI in middle school may need to use Series 4 for 9th grade. If your high schoolers did not take STARI in middle school, we recommend Series 3 for 9th grade and Series 4 for 10th grade. To offer STARI in all four years of high school, you could either use Series 3 in 9th and 10th and Series 4 in 11th and 12th, or you could use Series 1 and 2 in high school, but be aware that their content is more geared to middle school. We generally recommend that series align with grade levels in the following way but you can choose any series that best engages your students.

Students may work with the curriculum for one or more years. While many students benefit from one year of STARI, others may benefit from additional years of the curriculum. Teachers may determine if a student needs an additional year of STARI based on the student’s progress by the end of the year.

The skills addressed are the same in each series. The levels of text difficulty are approximately the same in each series. The content of the texts is designed to be age-appropriate for the recommended grade level. For example, a text in the first unit of Series 1 is Middle School Confidential , which would not appeal to high school students. In contrast, the core text in Unit 3.1 is Game , by Walter Dean Myers, which is about a high school senior who hopes to get a basketball scholarship to college.

The four series do not build on one another. For example, if you have a group of seventh graders, and some of them used STARI Series 1 in sixth grade while others did not take STARI, all of them should use Series 2.

Yes. Each series includes three units, and together they span an entire school year.

While the series do not build on each other, each unit builds on the previous units within that series. So we recommend that you do not skip units, and do not start the school year with Unit 2 or Unit 3, since students will be missing essential skills from earlier units.

Lessons are carefully crafted around the engaging and challenging parts of each text. If you chose not to use a particular unit text, the lesson plans and workbook pages about that text would be unusable, so we don’t recommend this.

If you feel that a particular text or unit is not the right fit for your students, you can swap out the unit for a comparable unit in a different series. For example, if you don’t want to use Unit 2.1, you could use Unit 1.1 or 3.1 instead. If you don’t want to use Unit 3.2, you could use Unit 2.2 or 4.2 instead. The same sequence of skills are taught in each series, but the topics are slightly more sophisticated in the higher series.