The Science Behind HIP Books
What these books do for reluctant readers
At HIP, we like to focus on the abilities of our readers: the words they know, the stories they enjoy, their capacity to handle higher level thinking skills, their willingness to tackle many kinds of reading tasks. When we hear someone say, "That kid just can't read" we bristle at the idea. Almost every child can recognize hundreds of common words and can enjoy a good story. Our job - as parents and teachers - is to find books that children can read, and will want to read, and then use those books as a base for developing more sophisticated reading skills.
We take great pride when someone says, "Oh, my students used to read your books, but now they've moved on." That is the whole goal. Students should move on to more complex and sophisticated stories, but they can only do that with a firm grounding in comfortable and rewarding text.
HIP novels have been expressly designed to minimize the difficulties which reluctant readers face. This is both a science and an art. The chart below looks at common reading difficulties and explains how HIP novels help students overcome them.
|
Difficulty |
HIP Approach |
|
Vocabulary is too difficult |
HIP carefully controls the readability of text. 96 to 98% of all the words used are on our list of 800 common words. Any words outside that list are (a) phonetically decodable or (b) carefully introduced in the text and the teacher's guide. |
|
Some parts are too hard to read |
HIP checks the readability level every hundred words. If a child can read page 1, he can read the entire book. |
|
I can't get started |
Unlike ordinary books, HIP novels start on page 3. There is an illustration on page 4 or 5. A child reaches page 6 after reading only 300 words of text. Usually, he's halfway through chapter one at this point. |
|
What's this about? |
Our teacher's guides provide two or three different ways to introduce the topic and the book. We know that hooking the reluctant reader is always a teacher's first task. |
|
I can't visualize the story |
HIP provides two illustrations each chapter - not to tell the story - but to help reluctant readers "see" the story. |
|
I can't keep up the pace of reading |
Reluctant readers usually read at 60 to 100 words per minute. This is just a third the speed of ordinary speech. HIP novels have only 1000-1200 words per chapter. The best readers finish a chapter in 6-8 minutes; the slowest readers need only 12 to 20 minutes. A little extra time is all it takes. |
|
The letters get mixed up |
HIP tested dozens of typeface and line space combinations. What we use in the books is the typeface and spacing combination which produced the fewest miscues. |
|
I sometimes skip whole lines |
The line-spacing in HIP books has been tested to minimize line-skipping. As well, there are no hyphens to break words at the end of lines. Our testing shows hyphenated words are frequently skipped or misread. At HIP, we rewrite to eliminate this issue. |
