ELL News Headlines

Dorothy Fredrick first heard of Head Start in the 1990s from a teacher whose children she was babysitting. At the time, Fredrick lived in Ellicott, Colo., a rural community about an hour outside Colorado Springs. Until then, she had never heard of the federal program. Twenty-three years later, she is now the curriculum, instruction and training coordinator for the Community Partnership for Childhood Development, the agency administering Head Start programs in the Colorado Springs region. She oversees curriculum development, professional development and new staff training for 69 classrooms.  Fredrick’s journey isn't all that unusual. It's in keeping with Head Start’s larger mission to serve two generations, empowering parents to pursue education and careers, often within Head Start facilities.

A 16-year-old girl was abducted, raped, beaten and held captive for months in Congo. She became pregnant and gave birth. In an effort to avoid the stigma and shame that this would bring upon her family and because she would not be eligible for any other marriage, her parents joined the perpetrators' family in trying to force her to marry her abductor. Although she was expected to obey, she refused. The perpetrator's family took her baby. Remarkably, she managed to escape and make her way to a center where she could access services for girls like her. There she created a story cloth.

Jacob Castaneda is executive director of programs in Los Angeles for Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM), a nonprofit dedicated to creating pathways for underserved students to become scientists, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists. In this editorial, he writes, "Far too often, talented math students at schools in low-income communities barely have access to grade-level work, let alone advanced curricula… Rather than letting these high-aptitude students founder, we must find ways to nurture their talent. Students from higher-income high schools graduate from college with majors in science, technology, engineering and math at twice the rate (16 percent) of those from low-income high schools (8 percent)."

The Trump administration, brushing aside tens of thousands of protest letters, gave final approval on Wednesday to a rule that will remove nearly 700,000 people from the federal food-stamp program by strictly enforcing federal work requirements. The rule, which was proposed by the Agriculture Department in February, would press states to carry out work requirements for able-bodied adults without children that governors have routinely been allowed to waive, especially for areas in economic distress.

Young children need consistent exposure to high-quality, play-based early learning experiences at home and at school for literacy and language to flourish. This is especially true for pre-K children who are dual language learners (DLLs), cultivating these fundamental skills while acquiring a second language. With particular interest in how young DLLs' language and literacy skills develop over time, a new study compares children's development in both English and their home language over the course of one pre-K year.

Dr. Kelli Sandman-Hurley, co-founder of the Dyslexia Training Institute in San Diego, California, says dyslexics learning English can sometimes be overlooked for two reasons: first, there's not a lot of research on the topic and often educators don't know what to look for, and second, reading difficulties can often be attributed to learning a new language.

Teaching Thanksgiving in schools is often heavy on the crafts and light on the historical facts. Teachers Michelle Portera, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz and Molly Till talk about how they do it.

For communities with significant numbers of Latino and immigrant residents, the barriers to an accurate 2020 Census count are high—and so are the stakes for their schools.  The census count has grave implications for school funding for the next decade: Undercounts could put districts at risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars for early-childhood education, high-poverty-area schools, special education, foster-care funding, and child-care support for low-income families.  Nearly 40 states are likely to miss out on federal funds for programs serving families and children because of an undercount of Latino residents, according to a report released in earlier this year from Child Trends, a Bethesda, Md.-based nonpartisan research organization.

In today's world, there are more people living as refugees than at any time in history since WWII. Around half of those refugees are children. And in the political climate we have in the world today, the average length of time a refugee spends away from their home country is nearly 20 years. That means millions of children around the world are spending their entire childhood as refugees, often in camps that have few, if any luxuries, and lack the educational opportunities kids need. Sesame Street wants to address that.

Every day, every season, we are grateful, writes Traci Sorell, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and author of We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga, a colorful picture book illustrated by Fran Lessac and featured on this year's Read Across America calendar. The picture book takes readers on a journey through the year with a Cherokee family and their tribal nation as they express thanks for celebrations and moments big and small. Sorell, who was born and raised in the Cherokee Nation, began writing for children when she noticed a lack of books that feature contemporary Native Americans. NEA Today spoke to Sorell about We Are Grateful:Ostaliheliga and the lessons it contains.