No Passive Partners

 Looking at the ceiling, wiggling in the carpet, staring at another group...Is this what you sometimes get from partner reading?  Me too!  Until I started holding the students accountable for time spent in reading together.  I wanted my students to get all they could out of their reading time and I like for them to read in partners part of the times.  So I needed to find a way to have the partner who wasn't doing the reading not only get engaged, but stay engaged.  I call this No Passive Partners.  I like for each child in a pair to have a responsibility, a job if you will.  One reads and the other one listens because they follow up on what the first one read.  Of course, you must model, model, model so the students can see what it should look like.  One reads and the other one follows up with what they learned or remembered or questions they had about the text.  This also sparks conversations between students about what was read.  With practice, my students have gotten very good at this and know every time we partner read, they both have a job to do.  I think they get so much more out of the texts this way.  Linda Hoyt suggests putting stop signs (Post It notes) in the book where you would like for the partners to stop and report what they remembered, learned, etc...  A lot of times, I just ask the kids to stop at the end of each page or each 2 page spread, which ever is appropriate.  Now my partners run smoothly and the students gain better understanding of what they just read.  Here are some bookmarks you can print on cardstock and have the students take with them to remind them of what they can tell their partner when they aren't the one reading.