Our Lady of Lourdes students pair up for literacy

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Courtesy of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School

For the past six years, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School has taken a peer participation approach to reading and writing.

Students in fourth grade and eighth grade are paired together in the Reading Buddies program. They meet every Tuesday and Wednesday, and it quickly becomes the most anticipated days of the week for these students.

The eighth-grade students have a responsibility to help younger students with their reading, writing and comprehension skills and to also set a good example.

It is a fun and positive experience for the fourth-graders to work and get to know the “big kids” at school and strengthen their reading fluency, interpretation of text and writing skills through guided practice with their buddy.

Trisha McCormick, the Middle School Academy English language arts teacher, and Heather Orges, Lourdes’ fourth-grade teacher, started the program after both had success with similar programs at different schools before coming to Lourdes. They discussed what had worked at their previous schools and researched other ideas to incorporate to shape the most effective program for Lourdes.

“The best way to learn and reinforce a concept is to be responsible for teaching it to someone else,” Orges said.  

For the eighth-graders, the program further develops their own literacy skills. They want to teach the younger students well, so they’re more careful of sentence structure and verb/subject agreement, and some realize they weren’t doing those things in their own writing and correct it.

The program also develops their social and emotional skills like patience, empathy and self-confidence as they work with their fourth-grade buddy. By the end of the year, even the shyest of eighth-graders can “read with their heads up and talk to the younger students,” McCormick said.  

Beyond academics, the buddy program strengthens the roots of the Lourdes community as grades across campus work and share together. This has become more important with the opening of the Lourdes Middle School Academy, because most of those students’ classes are not in the main building but at the nearby Judge Memorial Catholic High School.

“It is heartwarming to watch the older students get excited to buddy up with a younger student,” McCormick said. “They always reminisce about their buddy when they were in fourth grade. Reading Buddies have become a tangible way to show the love of Jesus to another person.”