Book Buddy for Classrooms

Book Buddy is intentionally designed to support early readers (ages 4–8) by encouraging children to listen to stories while following along in a physical book. Research shows that hearing fluent reading while tracking text helps build phonological awareness, decoding skills, vocabulary, and reading fluency—especially for developing and struggling readers. The app makes it easy to turn listening and reading centers into meaningful literacy practice, not just screen time. Book Buddy helps you quickly build and manage classroom bookshelves of read-along YouTube videos, so students can listen independently while you focus on teaching, and then begin reading along when ready too. What you can do with Book Buddy: - Create and manage multiple classroom bookshelves - Share bookshelves with fellow teachers - Add books easily by name, with built-in image and video search - Save time with community-powered book settings when others have added the same title - Set custom start and end times to start at the right part of the story - Organize books by order, themes, or visibility - Provide students with a clean, distraction-free listening interface via a simple URL - Customize the public bookshelf with colors, text, and optional passcode protection Book Buddy is built to be used with real books in students’ hands, helping young readers connect spoken language to print, strengthen decoding, and grow confidence as independent readers.