getting ready for Reading Buddies

Just in case any of my readers are in the Lafayette, CO area and have kids in grades 1-3 or 6-12--and also because I'm proud of what I'm doing--I wanted to direct you to the information about our library's Reading Buddy program that I've just learned how to post on the library website. Learn more about this award-winning reading enrichment program here and here! Your kids can even apply online to participate.

When my supervisor and I presented a session on Reading Buddies at the Colorado Association of Libraries recently, another librarian came up to us, thanked us for sharing the information, and said, "This is exactly what libraries should be doing, but we've moved away from this sort of thing." To see handouts from our talk (materials we use with Reading Buddies), click here and scroll to "Friday."

Let me conclude by tying my job into my blog: about a third of the Little Buddy participants come from bilingual homes (almost all with Spanish backgrounds, one from the Philippines). One of the moms submitted an application for her kids for the spring and told me that she specifically wanted them to practice reading in English, not Spanish, because she and her husband speak only Spanish at home. These girls are perfectly bilingual at ages 6 and 8! Then a dad turned in an application for his son. They're a monolingual English family--or at least they were until they enrolled the boy at Pioneer, the bilingual immersion school here in Lafayette. Now the parents are still monolingual but their son is learning Spanish! His dad asked me to try to match him with a Big Buddy who speaks Spanish. And finally, when looking over evaluations from previous sessions, it struck me that one parent of a Big Buddy praised the program for giving her monolingual teen daughter the chance to see what it's like to be bilingual.