What are Reading Buddies?
The Reading Buddy programme is a form of peer mentoring which pairs younger students together, allowing them to take turns reading to each other, with guidance from an older student or adult volunteer buddy. This framework allows for authentic reading practice to a live audience and a model of fluent reading.
Benefits for Big Buddies:
- establish a strong sense of community.
- further develop their own literacy skills.
- improved self-confidence.
- develop interpersonal, leadership, problem-solving skills, communication and time-management skills.
- meet new people and explore new opportunities.
- develop a deeper appreciation for the value of reading.
Benefits for Little Buddies:
- grow as readers by practicing reading aloud and increasing their fluency, phrasing and intonation.
- gradually progress from needing to constantly sound out words to reading with accuracy and automaticity.
- learn positive behaviours, social skills and character traits such as kindness and patience from their Big Buddies.
- essentially have a personal tutor helping them with their reading.
- receive immediate feedback and strategies to decode unknown words.
- build awareness and comprehension skills as time is allotted to discuss the texts they read.
- reading to another person naturally motivates them to practice reading fluently.
- provides the perfect opportunity to practice phrased and expressive reading.
