ELL News Headlines

Getting parents and families actively engaged in a student’s academic performance and overall school experience can make a difference in a child’s life. But how do schools and districts best entice families, especially linguistically diverse immigrant families, to give of their time and resources? Bethzaida Sotomayor, a teacher in the English-for-speakers-of-other-languages department of the Volusia County schools in Florida, and Ana Pasarella, the director of family and community engagement at the Alvin school district in Texas, came together for an Education Week webinar on Nov. 14 to share best practices for engaging English-learner and immigrant families.

Ocean Lin, a member of Chalkbeat’s 2024-25 Student Voices Fellowship class, is a high school junior who wants to pursue a career in chemistry. In this personal essay, he writes, "The pressure could be something I, along with millions of children of immigrants, navigate our whole lives. We learn to coexist with it. Success in high school and beyond feels like a given. And working in a field that doesn’t pay well or waiting for the perfect job isn’t really an option because we want to provide lives of comfort for our parents, who never lived such lives."

Creating origami designs like dogs and houses can help elementary students better understand concepts like shapes and lines.

Books in translation are a great resource to enrich young minds and library shelves. Here, SLJ rounds up 7 recent titles for the middle grade set.

The English learner population in the United States stands at about 5.2 million students. Sixteen percent of these students also have disabilities. So, in addition to English-language instruction, they’re legally entitled to special education services.

“Carl the Collector” is aimed at 4-to-8-year-olds and was designed to celebrate the variety and potential of neurodivergent kids.

Students can explore science concepts through an activity that encourages them to record their observations in thoughtful ways.

When ChatGPT was released to the public in November of 2022, it didn’t take long for the technology to make its way into K-12 classrooms across the country. Now, two years later, schools are starting to develop guidance for teachers and students addressing the use of generative AI in the classroom.

Engaging project-based learning activities can provide avenues for new educators to teach students crucial social-emotional skills.

We tend to think of math as a subject that’s accessible only to certain types of people. But that’s a false assumption, and it’s holding back achievement for far too many students. With the right instructional approach, everyone can learn and do math.