The science
The science behind our readers
Every HummingRead reader is built on well-established findings about how children learn to read: the right level of difficulty, a story short enough to finish in one sitting, and support that fades as the reader grows. This page explains each choice and the research behind it.
The right level of difficulty
A child’s reading level is set by how hard the words and sentences are, not by how long the story is. Children understand a story well when they already know nearly all of its words and can read its sentences without strain.
Every HummingRead band has a readability target that controls sentence length and word difficulty. New words that matter to the story appear in context first, then in a short Words to Know box, so a child meets them with support rather than getting stuck.
One reader, one sitting
Each reader is sized to fill about two printed pages at its band’s type size. With its checks and talk questions, it fits a single 40-minute reading lesson.
| Band | Grade and age | Words per reader |
|---|---|---|
| Purple | Pre-K to K · ages 4–5 | about 350 |
| Yellow | Grades 1–3 · ages 6–8 | about 550 |
| Green | Grades 4–6 · ages 9–11 | about 800 |
| Blue | Grades 7–9 · ages 12–14 | about 1,000 |
| Red | Grades 10–12 · ages 15–17 | about 1,100 |
| Silver | First-year university · adult | about 1,500 |
Why one sitting matters:
- The whole story stays in mind. A child can hold the beginning, middle and end together, which is what understanding a story requires.
- Finishing builds confidence. Completing a whole story at the right level is a success a child can build on.
- Effort goes to meaning. Working memory is small. When decoding and length use it up, little is left for understanding.
Longer books come as a series.
A long novel becomes a series of episodes, each about the length of a single reader at that band and each ending where the story breaks. Together they tell the whole story: its characters, suspense, turning points and ending.
- Each episode fits one sitting, so the child keeps the benefit of finishing a whole piece.
- Each episode opens with a recap. Recalling what happened last time strengthens memory more than rereading it.
- Reading across days helps it stick. Spacing a story over several sessions helps children remember more than reading it all at once.
- Each episode ends on a cliffhanger, which gives children a reason to come back and builds a daily reading habit.
Why serials are short at Purple
A long book comes to the shelf as a serial, and the serial is capped: six episodes at Purple, eight at Yellow, twelve at Green. From Blue up a book runs as long as its chapters. The caps follow what a young reader can hold from one sitting to the next.
Working memory grows steadily through the primary years (Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge & Wearing, 2004), so a five-year-old carries less of last week’s episode into this one than a nine-year-old does. What a child remembers of a story is its chain of causes — what led to what — more than its length (Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985); so every later episode opens with a recap that restates that chain in a few lines, and a Purple cliffhanger is one question a child can hold overnight. And the point of a serial is the habit: how much a child reads and is read to predicts language and reading growth (Mol & Bus, 2011), so a serial is sized to be finished. Six sittings at Purple is a fortnight of bedtimes.
A first meeting with the great stories
A HummingRead reader is a child’s first meeting with a great story, not a replacement for the original. By twelve, a child can have met dozens of great stories, and when they are ready for a full novel, they already know which ones they love.
- Background knowledge makes harder texts easier. A child who already knows the characters and plot can spend their effort on the original’s language and style.
- Interest drives reading. Children choose harder books about stories they already care about.
- Breadth builds cultural literacy. Knowing many stories lets a child recognise references and join the conversation.
Every reader’s About page names the original work and its author, and says when it was first published. Meet the great stories early. Read the originals when you’re ready.
What surrounds the story
- Short titled sections let a reader pause, predict what comes next and absorb what they’ve read.
- Pause questions during the story, and a Quick Check after it, alternate between remembering what just happened and predicting what comes next. Recalling from memory strengthens learning more than rereading, and predicting keeps a child thinking ahead and reading with purpose.
- A picture of the exact moment, beside the text, is remembered better than text alone. We leave out decorative pictures, which can lower understanding.
- Support fades as readers grow. Pictures and defined words help a young reader but slow an older one, so they decrease band by band.
- A review card a week later brings the story back once more. Spaced review is one of the strongest findings in memory research.
Type size and spacing
Young readers read faster and make fewer errors with larger, well-spaced type, so HummingRead’s type and spacing are set for each band, following the research below: largest for the youngest readers, stepping down as they grow. On screen, readers can enlarge the text.
- Ages 5 to 7: Reading speed fell as text got smaller, and children of all ages made more errors on smaller text (Hughes & Wilkins, 2000).
- Ages 7 to 9: Sentences in a larger typeface were understood 9% faster, and children scored four months higher in reading age when a test kept its type large (Wilkins et al., 2009).
- Ages 8 and up: Size matters less, and bigger is not always better, so clear spacing and a clean typeface take over (Katzir et al., 2013).
Sources
- Hughes, L. & Wilkins, A. (2000). Typography in children’s reading schemes may be suboptimal. Journal of Research in Reading, 23(3).
- Wilkins, A. et al. (2009). Typography for children may be inappropriately designed. Journal of Research in Reading.
- Katzir, T., Hershko, S. & Halamish, V. (2013). The effect of font size on reading comprehension on second and fifth grade children: bigger is not always better. PLoS ONE, 8(9).
- Gathercole, S. E., Pickering, S. J., Ambridge, B., & Wearing, H. (2004). The structure of working memory from 4 to 15 years of age. Developmental Psychology, 40(2), 177–190.
- Trabasso, T., & van den Broek, P. (1985). Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24(5), 612–630.
- Mol, S. E., & Bus, A. G. (2011). To read or not to read: A meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137(2), 267–296.