Reading Friends Program
The Reading Friends Program is run by the Millers Point Youth & Employment Partnership. The program provides support to children in Years one to six at Fort Street Public School (Millers Point) in the area of literacy.
Reading Friends are volunteers from Arup, Lend Lease and Westpac who spend time in the classroom each week encouraging students to develop a positive approach to reading, comprehension and writing skills through the use of story books and novels.
Currently Arup has seven staff in the Sydney office who participate in the program and visit the school each Wednesday lunchtime during the school term. To join the program, every volunteer is required to complete training provided by Millers Point Youth & Employment Partnership which includes a four hour session on volunteering and another short introductory session on literacy which is held at the school.
As well as providing friendship and support to young people and responding specifically to their unique literacy needs, our volunteers not only develop their mentoring and volunteering skills but also find a unique opportunity for personal growth.
This program also helps to provide a solution to the consistently reducing numbers of parents who traditionally provide this volunteer support, but are now unavailable during school hours due to full time work commitments.
How the sessions work
Volunteers participate in small reading groups. The first session, ‘reading helpers/buddies’ is for the younger children (infants school). Volunteers listen to each student read and work through sight words for a short period on a rotating basis, allowing each student the opportunity to work one on one with a reading friend/buddy.
The second session of the program is for primary school aged students, where volunteers work with small groups of three to five students, whose reading abilities are at a similar level.
