|By Gale Staff|
This year, National Young Readers Week will take place from November 10–14. As you head into the final stretch ahead of the winter holidays, this is a great opportunity to celebrate the power of reading to fuel a lifetime of learning and enjoyment.
For some students, though, reading can still feel like hard work. Our 2023–24 Project Tomorrow study discovered that nearly half of surveyed students across grades 6–12 “felt stressed or nervous when reading.” Nearly three in four teachers cited students’ lack of confidence or embarrassment at a perceived lack of ability as impairing their reading fluency.
National Young Readers Week gives educators a chance to reframe reading as something that’s joyful, inclusive, and attainable for every learner—and large print books can help. Let’s take a look at how.
Curious about what else teachers reported? Download the complete Project Tomorrow study on how large print helps students transition from reluctant to confident readers.
Large Print Books Build Reader Confidence
Youth large print books from Thorndike Press feature crisp contrast, larger type, and generous spacing between letters, words, and lines. These formatting choices remove the barriers in standard print that can drain stamina and undercut motivation, making it easier for readers to keep their focus on the page.
Large print books create a more inclusive reading experience for students working on fluency, building comprehension, managing ADHD, or learning English. This helps them stay engaged and feel more confident in their abilities. And because the collection spans hundreds of titles across grade levels and genres, they can read the same material in duplicate titles alongside their peers.
Even students reading at grade level benefit from a roomier page. Teachers report that 74% of students showed increased stamina and 70% enjoyed reading more when using large print.
As you look ahead to National Young Readers Week, take advantage of large print books as a research-backed, pedagogically rigorous tool that is simple to implement and can benefit the entire class.
Support Early Reading Skills With Large Print
If we think of learning to read as a multi-step process, one of the first steps we must master is decoding—turning printed letters into sounds, and then blending them into words. Without decoding skills, the process of reading is mentally taxing because every sentence feels like a puzzle to solve, rather than a story to follow.
For a student who is still developing decoding skills, standard print can create an unnecessary barrier to a comfortable reading experience. Small type and crowded lines blur letter shapes, so the combination rn may look like m and turn barn into bam. When a sentence doesn’t make sense because of those substitutions, readers have to stop, backtrack, and try again—breaking their concentration.
Large print’s wider spacing and clearer letterforms give the eye room to distinguish sounds, syllables, and word parts, resulting in substantial growth in early reading skills. Educators reported that 73% of students improved their fluency and 67% improved their decoding when working with large print text.
In large print, the extra space around each letter makes long words, like transportation, easier to visually chunk (trans-port-ation) helping students recognize familiar word parts more quickly. That visual clarity makes it easier to assemble the word accurately and rapidly, which allows students to maintain a smoother, more continuous reading flow.
Because large print makes decoding and fluency easier, it also naturally supports the development of automaticity—or the point at which decoding becomes so effortless that the brain no longer has to devote conscious effort to sounding out each word.
With less energy spent on fundamental skills, your learners can focus on the story itself, making reading an enjoyable and confidence-building experience.
When nine-year-old Sid struggled with reading, his mom tried everything from occupational therapy to specialized interventions. Then, she handed him a large print copy of The Wild Robot. Amy shared, “For the first time, my son read because he wanted to.”
Soon, he was tackling Island of the Blue Dolphins alongside the strongest readers in his class.
Support Stamina and Focus for Learners With ADHD
When a student with ADHD stares down the words in a standard-print book, they’re met with a wall of text that demands relentless focus. Letters crowd together, lines blur into one another, and the effort to hold a place on the page becomes exhausting.
After a few cycles of rereading the same lines or skipping over important context, frustration often replaces curiosity, and the student stops investing their attention in the narrative.
In large print books, the shorter lines and wider spacing reduce the chance of a student losing their place or skipping ahead, which in turn lowers the focus-draining cycle of self-correction. Just as importantly, the page feels less overwhelming, making it easier to stay engaged with the content instead of battling frustration with the format.
In classroom studies, 58% of students with ADHD said they felt less stress and anxiety when reading in large print—evidence that format can change how learners think about reading.
With fewer negative associations connected to the act of reading, students can redirect their energy toward healthy risks, such as volunteering to read aloud in class or sharing their insights about a story—moments that reinforce reading as a rewarding experience.
Support Code-Switching With Clearer Text Cues
For students learning English as a second language, there’s a tendency to look at their academic ability in English and assume that this is the extent of their capacity. But that’s not the whole story.
ESL students juggle constant code-switching between two language systems. That mental work makes it inevitable that they’ll sometimes mix up familiar words or endings that exist in their first language but work differently in English, or stumble on idiosyncrasies like wind (the breeze) versus wind (to turn) that completely alter the meaning of a sentence.
In standard print, the visual layout can obscure the cues English learners rely on to make sense of the language. Suffixes like –ed or –ing can blur into the word, making tense or function less clear, and long words lose the syllable breaks that would otherwise guide pronunciation. Large print provides additional scaffolding that naturally facilitates English language learning.
Case Study: McCollum High School’s “Cowboys Read!” Program
At McCollum High School in San Antonio, nearly one in five students participates in the school’s bilingual/ESL program. Many avoided checking out books because they feared fines or the stigma of losing materials.
Librarian Terrie Sharp saw how this hesitation kept students from practicing the English reading skills needed to pass accountability tests. During the pandemic, she used federal relief funds to pilot Cowboys Read! Sharp placed popular large print titles from Thorndike Press around campus to give English learners accessible, low-pressure opportunities to strengthen reading fluency and comprehension.
Sharp noted that large print’s shorter lines and clearer spacing reduced barriers for English learners, helping them build confidence.
She explained, “It’s amazing how kids open up because of what they’re reading and the connections they’re making . . . We are creating more empathetic readers.”
Read the complete case study to learn how large print created new opportunities for English learners and reluctant readers alike.
Diverse Titles for Diverse Readers
Reading ability is only one part of motivating students to pick up a book. Relevance matters as much as readability, and students engage most when stories reflect their lives and communities.
Within the extensive youth print catalog from Thorndike Press, your readers can find stories that mirror their own lives as well as ones that broaden their horizons. Here’s a preview of some of the most popular titles teachers and librarians are putting in students’ hands.
Tweens:
- Aviva vs the Dybbuk, Mari Lowe: A long-ago accident. An isolated girl named Aviva. And a ghostly dybbuk that only Aviva can see, causing mayhem and mischief that everyone blames on her.
- The Journey of Little Charlie, Christopher Paul Curtis: Twelve-year-old Charlie is down on his luck: His sharecropper father just died, and Cap’n Buck—the most fearsome man in Possum Moan, South Carolina—has come to collect a debt. Fearing for his life, Charlie strikes a deal with Cap’n Buck.
Teens:
- The Collectors, Multiple Authors: From A.S. King and an all-star team of contributors, this Printz Award–winning anthology shares stories about the remarkable things people choose to collect and the unexpected meaning those collections hold.
- A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, edited by Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman: Sixteen bestselling and acclaimed authors reimagine the folklore and mythology of East and South Asia in short stories that are by turns enchanting, heartbreaking, romantic, and passionate.
Spanish-Language:
- Tumbos,Celia Perez: Twelve-year-old Adela “Addie” Ramírez has a big decision to make when her stepfather proposes adoption. Addie loves Alex, but everything suddenly feels like it’s moving too fast. She has a million questions—and the first is about the young man in the photo she found hidden away in her mother’s things.
- Alebrijes,Donna Barba Higuera: For 400 years, Earth has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms.
Every reader deserves the chance to connect with the power of stories. Large print helps make that possible by giving all students, regardless of ability, background, or interests, access to the books that might spark a lifelong love of reading.
As we celebrate National Young Readers Week, let’s use this moment to remind students that reading is for everyone—and that the proper format can make all the difference.
Create a more equitable reading experience with Thorndike Press. Reach out to your education consultant and ask how a simple change in format can turn reluctant readers into confident ones.
