The Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. Book Buddies program pairs volunteers with students to help improve their reading skills.
Tregoning
Long
A BCSC program helping second- and third-graders improve their reading is back for the 19th year at a time when there’s been intense focus in the district and statewide in ensuring elementary school students have the needed literacy skills.
BCSC’s Book Buddies program, in conjunction with the Bartholomew County Literacy Task Force, is guided by the mission that all second- and third-graders will read on grade level by the end of the school year.
Students who take part in the program are typically six months to a year behind in reading, according to Book Buddies Director Gretchen Tregoning. They meet during the school day with a different volunteer for half-hour sessions Monday through Thursday where they read books, learn sight words, play literacy games and more.
“Our teachers report that they see positive changes in fluency for the students, in their attitudes towards reading, in their confidence towards reading and in their vocabularly,” Tregoning said of students involved in Book Buddies.
Jeannie Long, BCSC elementary curriculum specialist, said these early years are crucial for developing a student’s reading skills.
“The ultimate goal of all the things that we do in reading, is that students are able to comprehend what they’re reading, understand what they’ve read and make meaning of it,” Long said. “Really, in those (Kindergarten, first and second grade years), they’re working a whole lot on all the foundations. And then second and third grade are those bridge years where they’re really working a lot on that fluency.”
How the program works
There are 123 students in the Book Buddies program so far this year. But some of BCSC’s 11 elementary schools don’t yet have a full team of volunteers, so kids are unable to attend the program four days a week, BCSC officials said. Many schools have a list of students waiting to be added to Book Buddies once more volunteers enroll.
Volunteers undergo training for the program and are expected to provide an hour total of their time per week to two students. Each day has two sessions for volunteers to choose from depending on their availability.
A paid staff member, referred to as a site supervisor, oversees the program at each school and provides the reading materials.
So far, 233 volunteers have signed up this year. Of those, 190 are returning volunteers, per Tregoning.
“Our volunteers love the fact that it’s structured and organized for them,” Tregoning said. “They are always amazed at the growth that they see in the students, and a lot of them comment on how being part of the Book Buddies program not only helps the students, but it helps them feel connected to the community as well.”
Each session consists of four parts: one where a student rereads part of a book that they read the day before; another practicing sight words; one where students read a new book; and a final portion where students focus on a particular phonics pattern, taking part in what’s referred to as “word studies.”
“The students are able to read with an adult in the room and that adult then will ask them some questions about the story,” Long said. “So they’re working on that comprehension with the story that they’re reading — asking about characters, the setting, what’s going on in the story. It’s getting the students to be able to talk about what they’ve read, to reflect on what they have read, and to do some visualization of what they see happening in that story.”
The first part of the session is to work on retention and improving fluency — studies show the more time a student reads a passage they’re familiar with, the more it helps their fluency.
Sight words — commons words students are encouraged to memorize so they automatically recognize them in the future — change weekly. After they’re practiced four different times with volunteers over the course of the week “they have them all locked into their brains” typically by Thursday, according to Tregoning. Sight words do one of two things — they either follow a phonics pattern to be addressed in a later session, or they’re words that don’t follow standard rules for sounding out.
During the third part of the session, students alternate between fiction and nonfiction books in order to get experience reading the two types of texts.
The word studies portion has students engaging in a game or activity while focusing on a particular phonics pattern, meaning common letter combinations with predictable spoken sounds.
“When I worked with some students at Mt. Healthy, it was a really fun time,” Long said. “The students were so excited to come and work with the adults in the room.”
IREAD, how Book Buddies can help
Book Buddies has proved an asset in preparing students to pass IREAD-3, the test given to every one of the state’s third-graders to measure their foundational reading skills.
Senate Bill 1, passed by the state legislature last session, means that third-graders who do not pass the test could be held back starting this school year.
At BCSC, 85% of third-graders passed the IREAD-3 exam during the spring and summer, up from 80.1% in 2023 and a couple of percentage points higher than the state average. All but two of BCSC’s elementary schools saw an increase — passing rates at BCSC schools this year ranged from 100% at CSA Lincoln Campus to 73% at Taylorsville Elementary School, records show.
“The success we’ve seen over the course of this past year is due to the intentionality of our teachers working with our students,” said Laura Hack, BCSC director of elementary curriculum. “It’s intentionality in small-group learning, it’s intentionality with one-on-one opportunities for students to grow, and then intentionality with our administrators looking at the data and then realizing, that our kids are more than data. Our kids are human beings in our classrooms who need a little bit more support, sometimes in the area of reading, and they reach those hard-to-find areas and find resources to help them.”
“It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach to getting our elementary students to read and we’re proud of where we’ve grown this past year,” Hack said.
Overall, 723 of 851 BCSC third-graders passed IREAD-3 — of the 128 who did not, 81 were eligible for what’s called good cause exemptions, meaning, for example, they are a student with special needs or learning English as a new language. The other 47 students would’ve been held back under Senate Bill 1.
The legislation also requires that all second-graders take IREAD-3 before they head into third grade as a means of gauging where they’re at and seeing if any interventions need to be made. BCSC got a head start on that last year because the current crop of third-graders took IREAD-3 last year. Results showed that of 812 second-graders who took the test, 363 passed, 131 were on track to pass once they became third-graders, and 318 were deemed at risk of not passing the test the following year, meaning further interventions are to be put in place to help them pass. Those include mandatory summer school, continuous progress monitoring and Book Buddies.
Notably, 98% of third-graders who took part in Book Buddies last year passed IREAD-3. In addition, 24% of second-graders who began the last school year reading below grade-level and participated in the program are on track to pass IREAD-3 as third-graders. Another 22% of second-graders involved with Book Buddies already passed the test meant for third-graders.
“The biggest thing that people worry about, and that keeps them from volunteering is they worry that they themselves are not a strong reader when they read aloud,” Tregoning said. “But our volunteers don’t read to kids — they are just reacting to the students, and they may read a sentence or two to them, but typically our students are doing the reading. So it is easier than you think it’s going to be to come and be a volunteer.”
Those interested in the program can find more information at barthcobookbuddies.weebly.com.
