To be the best thing since sliced bread. Literally, the first story is about two kids who imagine themselves going to Mars to pick up rocks shaped like a triangle, a square, and a circle. Then, the boy has no more room in his bag, so the girl lets him use her's. The end.

For K5, Into Reading's fiction stories are too structurally complex in syntax, text structure, plot details, etc. SAAVAS', on the other hand, felt like an insult to my K5 kiddo's intelligence. It was as if the developers thought K5ers would find a story about 2 kids picking up 2D shaped rocks

It's pretty much a less detailed version of Into Reading. The stories are much less engaging than Into Reading's, which is saying A LOT. There are literally no authentic books (besides decodable and leveled readers) as instructional mentor texts. Every read aloud was written for the program.

Same with SAAVAS. Test scores tanked in the 2nd year.