Bilingual Buddies: A Mentoring Program

Bilingual Buddies is a peer mentoring program I started at my school to help our ESOL students who enter school speaking limited or no English. I know you have these students too, and it has to be a scary experience for these little ones. This program was born to increase their level of comfort and sense of community. I know every school has different demographics and of course this would have to work differently at different schools.

Below you’ll see the step-by-step set up of the program in case you’d like to replicate it (or parts of it). The forms can be located here.

STEP-BY-STEP

1. Get administrator buy-in. (Put some of these documents in a folder to show them if you want to seem fancy).
2. Create a running list of kids at your school with minimal English language skills. As we all know, some kids enter the classroom with no English language skills at all (which has to be terrifying for them).
3. Create a list of upper grades students who will be the Bilingual Buddy Mentors (we used 4th and 5th only). Ideally these students should speak their native language fluently AND who want to work with younger kids who don’t speak English. (At my school our primary need was in Spanish… but did have one Japanese mentoring pair.) We simply had 4th/5th grade homeroom teachers as their class for anyone who was interested to raise their hand if they were interested.
4. Host a 15-minute training session for the Bilingual Buddies Mentors. The training is basic. (See agenda and overview of training).This will differ school to school. At our school we have the mentors go to the younger kids’ classes right before announcements in the morning so that they can translate those. The mentors spend about 20 minutes in the mentees class, doing whatever flashcards, assignments, story reading that they mentee’s teacher would like.
5. Distribute reminder notes for Mentors to put on their desk.
6. Distribute congratulations letter to parents.
7. Invite Administration to come in the thank the student mentors.

Another reason for this program… so many times we as staff, ask other kids in that class who speak that language to be full-time translators for the non-English speaking kids… and it’s not really fair to do that. Yes, it has to be done for communication survival, but how nice if you can find an older kid to help out a bit.

Have Questions? Let me know here.