We have been trialling a buddy reading system for the past few weeks in room eight and room six. We have been buddy reading occasionally with room six over the past year or so, but I thought that peer buddy reading aloud might help our room 8 kids read more, grow to love reading more, develop better expression, and learn more vocabulary with support from a buddy.
We had some sessions on how to support our buddy, e.g. waiting for word attack, try that again, does that make good sense?, discussing hard/unknown words, discussing reading choices etc.
Students read aloud for about 8 minutes, then swap for buddy to read. We need to allow a few more minutes for reading chat each session, e.g. 2 mins making up to about 20! Ten minutes seemed too long, and five minutes too short. I think we might move up to ten when all the kids have chosen better novels/texts that they are really interested in. They are thinking and discussing their text choices much more lately.
I was really pleased to see and hear every pair in class getting really stuck in and focusing on their reading and listening with very good concentration evident.
We have a report back session randomly, every second or third day, with buddies sharing the key ideas they heard their buddy reading, then buddy talk about the chosen texts.
The Room 6 buddy readers are moving on to asking some specific comprehension, evaluation and understanding questions as part of their session, every morning Monday to Thursday at 9am sharp.
This will take their session up to 20 minutes too, matching what is happening in our class.
