Reading Buddies is a program in which older students in a school partner up with younger students to read to them. The frequency of how often reading buddies meet varies between schools. I’ve read about programs that meet once a week and once a month. The following Edutopia video describes the reading buddies program used at Amigos School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The video above describes training older students to provide reading support to the younger students. Examples of what they train older students to do is to describe words younger students might find difficult, echo reading, making inferences, and vocabulary. The first session of reading buddies is about making connections in which older students and younger students get to know one another and talk about books they like and books they don’t like. After the first session, the younger students and the older students read together, and the older students practice the skills they learned in training.
The benefits described in the video for the younger students is that they do not feel intimidated by the older students, and older students develop empathy when working with younger children. Another very important benefit to reading buddies is developing fluency in reading. Both older and younger students have an increase in reading levels when they are able to practice reading with their reading buddies. For more about the benefits and statistics of reading buddies, read the Teacher Vision article linked below:
When I was in third grade, my school had a reading buddies program, and we mentored students in the bridge program. I honestly don’t remember much of it, but I remember being excited about it. I don’t remember how often we met, but when it was time for us to meet, I was excited. I think this was an early sign I wanted to be a teacher. I think I just looked forward to mentoring a young child, which is another benefit to reading buddies for older students. Older students feel good about mentoring a young child, which is a cause that is greater than themselves. They are contributing to a child’s ability to read. I believe that a reading buddies program has the same rewards for older students that the teaching profession has for those in or going into it. They find it rewarding to know that they helped a younger student learn something new and contribute to their growth as learners.
It takes a village to raise a child, but the younger the child, the larger that village needs to be.
In the Edutopia article below, we learn about Marcus and Tony. Tony is a kindergarten student and Marcus is his fifth grade reading buddy. Marcus and Tony both have issues with behavior, but after mentoring Tony, Marcus’ teacher noticed a change in his behavior. Marcus even started to mentor Tony with his behavior problems. Marcus saw Tony talking back to his teacher, and during their reading buddies session, Marcus told Tony not only to be nice to his teacher, but to not go down the same path he did. Here, we see how the reading buddies program helped a troubled boy become a mentor to someone in whom he saw himself. From this example, we can see that while younger students may be terrified of older students at first, when they become familiar with them, they really start to look up to them. In other words, Marcus was the role model Tony needed.
https://www.edutopia.org/article/reading-buddies
I think the most important takeaway for reading buddies is the importance of mentorship between younger and older students. As I have previously stated, older students can feel good about themselves knowing they contributed to a younger child’s learning. As for younger students, they not only learn from teachers, but older students as well. As cliche as this saying has become, it takes a village to raise a child, but the younger the child, the larger that village needs to be. There are a lot of skills that children in grades K-2 still need to learn, and the older students can help when they are a part of that village. I cannot stress enough that the younger children look to those older students as role models, and they don’t just learn positive behavior skills from the older students, but specific reading practices and metacognition when it is modeled. Reading buddies would be perfect for K-8 schools because those districts are already smaller communities, so it helps to foster that smaller community around the school by introducing students in the primary grades to upper elementary and middle school students. The pairing of grade levels all depends on the district; nonetheless, it helps to have the younger students around older students. Reading buddies not only helps create community in the school between our younger and older students, but it helps in the education of our students in the younger grades.
Aaron Burden (2017)