When we work with dyslexic adults or children we notice that reading small print is often difficult and tedious like slogging through mud. They cannot track print on a page or see the individual words and letters. They see all the text on a page as one entire image and cannot separate one word from the other.
Some dyslexics can read small text, but the process of reading can be exhausting requiring all their mental energy and concentration to decode the words so comprehension becomes very difficult. Often the dyslexic will read passages over and over trying to understand what they have read because their brain was concentrating on seeing and recognizing the words and cannot retain the information in their short term memory or move it onto long term memory.
So what can be done to help with this problem? One way is using large print books. They make it easier to see the words separately from each other and from other lines of text. The brain doesn’t have to concentrate so hard on decoding because the pictures of each word can be easily differentiated from other words. Comprehension and memory is improved and reading doesn’t feel like such a hard job.
Many children’s books are set in large print and should definitely be used with dyslexic students if at all possible. There are many websites that sell large print books for older children and adults. You can also find them in bookstores or libraries.
I have provided a couple of websites that I found that also sell large print books: www.largeprintbooks.com and www.amazon.ca/large-print-Books or www.amazon.com/Large-Print-Books
For more information and teaching solutions for dyslexia check out books on our homepage.