By now you know planets, signs, houses, the frame and the aspects. Put them all on one page and a chart has something like fifty facts. You can't say all of them, and you shouldn't try. What you need is an order.
Pull up Maya's chart and list everything we've covered: ten planets with signs and houses, a rising sign, a Midheaven, fourteen aspects. If you read them top to bottom with equal weight, you get a list, and a list isn't a person.
Good readers do something simpler. They find the few things that are loud, say those well, and let the rest color in the edges. Here's the order this course uses. It's three passes, and each one is quicker than the last.
Start with the Sun, the Moon, the rising sign and the chart ruler. Between them they cover what drives the person, what they need, how they come across, and who's steering. Read each one as the full sentence from lesson 4: planet, sign, house.
For Maya:
Already you can see a shape. Her outside (Taurus, Venus) is calm and earthy. Her Sun is watery and soft. Her Moon is serious and wants structure. If you stopped reading here, you'd still have something true-feeling to say.
Next, sort the aspects by orb, smallest first, the way lesson 6 showed. Then give extra weight to the ones that touch the big four.
Maya's tightest two are Saturn sextile Neptune (0.1) and Uranus sextile Pluto (0.3). Uranus and Pluto are both very slow, so nearly everyone her age has that one. Skip it. Saturn sextile Neptune counts, but mostly because Saturn is fused to her Sun.
After those come Mercury sextile Jupiter (1.9), Sun conjunct Mars (2.1), Mercury sextile Venus (2.6), Sun conjunct Saturn (2.8) and Sun sextile Neptune (2.9). The Sun appears three times in that short list. That's a strong hint about where the story is: the Sun, Mars and Saturn huddle you read in lesson 6. And Mercury linking to Venus, her chart ruler, says her thinking and her taste work well together.
Wider aspects like Venus square Uranus (6.0) still get read, just later and more lightly.
Last, step back and look at the chart's shape. Two things jump out in most charts: places where planets crowd together, and places where there's nothing.
A crowd of three or more planets in one sign is called a stellium. Maya has two. In Pisces, house 11: Sun, Mercury, Mars and Saturn. In Capricorn, house 9: Moon, Jupiter and Neptune, with the MC there too. That's seven of her ten planets in two signs. Her life will tend to pour into those two areas (friends and causes, belief and study) and pull attention from elsewhere.
Gaps count as much as crowds. Recall her element count from lesson 2: earth 5, water 4, fire 1, air 1. Now look closer at the fire and the air. The only fire is Pluto in Sagittarius, and the only air is Uranus in Aquarius. Both are slow outer planets. So all of her personal planets are in earth or water.
In a life, that might read as someone who feels and builds far more easily than she argues or leaps. Quick talk, sudden enthusiasm and taking a risk just to see what happens may feel foreign, or she may go looking for them in other people. Then there are the seven empty houses from lesson 4. They say where her attention doesn't go by default. They don't say something is missing.
Charts contradict themselves. Maya has calm Taurus rising and a restless Pisces crowd. She has a Capricorn Moon that wants order and a Venus square Uranus that likes to break it.
Don't pick a winner. The contradiction is usually the most interesting thing in the chart, because it's where the person feels pulled. A reader might say Maya looks settled from the outside while a lot moves underneath, and that she handles it by building structure, which sometimes she then has to escape. That sentence came straight from the disagreement.
That's all you need to read a whole chart, and in lesson 8 we'll do exactly that with Maya, start to finish.