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In this excerpt from Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners: Research, Theory, Policy, and Practice, Wayne Wright offers an introduction to No Child Left Behind legislation for English language learners, including information on accountability, assessments, English language proficiency standards, and implications for ELL identification and instruction.

In this excerpt from Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners: Research, Theory, Policy, and Practice, Wayne Wright summarizes the landmark Supreme Court Cases that have had significant implications for ELLs. In particular, Wright focuses on cases relating to segregation, the right of communities to teach their native languages to children, and the linguistic and education needs of ELLs.

In this excerpt from Foundations for Multlingualism in Education: from Principles to Practice, Ester de Jong shares an overview of the history of language policy in the United States. "Return to Bilingual Education" explores the 20th-century language policies that emerged after World War II, early bilingual education programs, and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968.

In this excerpt from Foundations for Multlingualism in Education: from Principles to Practice, Ester de Jong shares an overview of the history of language policy in the United States. "Immigrant Era: Focus on Assimilation" discusses the debate around language and language instruction at the beginning of the 20th century, in the midst of unprecedented waves of immigration to the U.S.

In this excerpt from Foundations for Multlingualism in Education: from Principles to Practice, Ester de Jong shares an overview of the history of language policy in the United States. "Early Years: Tolerance and Repression" explores the wide ranging language policies in the 18th and 19th century, from colonial acceptance and encouragement of multilingualism to later repression of the languages of Native Americans and West African slaves.

In this excerpt from Foundations for Multlingualism in Education: from Principles to Practice, Ester de Jong shares an overview of the history of language policy in the United States. "Toward a Monolingual USA? The Modern English-Only Movement" explores contemporary language policy, including No Child Left Behind and the English-Only statewide ballot initiatives in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts. In addition, de Jong explores the complexities of historic and modern attitudes towards language use and instruction throughout the U.S.

Share music and playful rhythms to help students generate and organize writing ideas. Kick off Music In Our Schools Month on Dr. Seuss's March 2 birthday with this pre-writing activity.

Parents are a child's first teacher, and there are many simple things you can do every day to share the joy of reading while strengthening your child's literacy skills.

Go on a "building" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Oral history is a method to learn about past events from the spoken stories of people who lived through them. When students conduct oral history research with members of their families or community they are participating in active learning rooted in the student's own experience. Students are actively engaged in collecting data when they do oral histories. Not only are they learning history, they are learning to be historians.

Winter vacation is a great time to read with your kids. It's also a good time to make reading (and writing) fun! Try some of the ideas below — and remember that it's ok to do these activities in your home language!

Many kids love to read about science and nature as well as real people, places, and events. Nonfiction books present information in engaging and interesting ways. Find out how you can help your child learn to navigate all the parts of a nonfiction book — from the table of contents to the diagrams, captions, glossary, and index.

A nationally representative sample of 213,100 fourth-graders participated in the 2011 assessment. Learn more about the key findings and trends in this Reading 2011 snapshot.

Learn the answers to 10 commonly asked questions that families and educators of students with disabilities have about charter schools. You'll also find links to state-specific resources that can help you better understand how charter schools work in your individual state.

Almost every week there is a news story about a new finding or discovery in science. These news stories are one of the exciting steps in the science world: sharing what you find! Helping kids share their own scientific findings will make them feel like part of the scientific community.

Learn about the common signs of dyslexia, how parents can support their child and celebrate their strengths, the role of assistive technology, how the latest brain research can help kids with dyslexia, and more.

Real-life scientists use charts and graphs as a way to organize and understand the information they have gathered. Young scientists can do the same! These activities will help you and your child create simple bar charts together, learn the vocabulary of graphing (axis, scale, labels, etc.), and have fun building "on-the-ground" graphs using real objects.

Charter schools have become a hot topic across the country, with the number of charters exploding in recent years. In this info brief, we examine the challenges and successes of special education in charter schools, including issues related to enrollment, legal identity, infrastructure, school choice, and virtual charters.

Reading aloud is one of the most important things parents and teachers can do with children. Learn about how reading aloud builds many important foundational skills, such as introducing vocabulary and providing a model of fluent, expressive reading, and find tips on how to read aloud with children at home and in the classroom, while building comprehension and helping children recognize what reading for pleasure is all about.

John Wills Lloyd, who has been at the University of Virginia's Curry School since 1978, began his career teaching children with learning and behavior problems in southern California in the 1960s. He completed Ph.D. studies at the University of Oregon in 1976. His research focuses on improving students' outcomes. Below John writes about subtyping LD. You can follow all of John's posts at LD Blog.

As we observe the 10th anniversary of 9/11 this year, it's important to remember that our commemoration is more than a moment of silence — it's an important educational opportunity for students, including English language learners (ELLs). Here are some of the lessons we learned from our experiences, as well as ideas for engaging ELLs in discussions about 9/11 and related issues.

Keeping kids interested and motivated to read is sometimes a challenge. Learn how to effectively motivate young learners, including tips from kids for teachers and parents, classroom strategies that work, and guidance for motivating struggling readers, reluctant readers, and boys.

Go on a "weather" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

It's called lots of different things: Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), and Million Minutes to name a few. Regardless of the different names, the intent is the same — to develop fluent readers by providing time during the school day for students to select a book and read quietly. Nearly every classroom provides some time during the instructional day for this independent silent reading. Despite its widespread use in classrooms, silent reading hasn't enjoyed much support in the research literature.

Discover some simple hands-on activities and games that can be done at home or in the backyard to help your child develop a deeper understanding of cause and effect — and strengthen reading comprehension and scientific inquiry skills.

Preschool teachers and child care providers play a critical role in promoting literacy, preventing reading difficulties, and preparing young children for kindergarten. Learn more about the characteristics of a quality preschool program, activities that build a solid foundation for reading, and how to advocate for your preschool child if you suspect learning delays.

Discover the importance of early language, listening, and speaking on literacy development. If you suspect that your child or a student is struggling with speech, language, and/or hearing problems, learn more about testing and assessment, accommodations, and additional professional help. You'll also find tips on reading aloud with children who have speech and language problems or who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Get the basic facts about what it takes for a young child to learn to read, best practices in teaching reading, the importance of oral language in literacy development, why so many children struggle, and more in this overview.

Get ready for a great school year. Discover ideas for planning a sparkling back-to-school night, creating a literacy-rich classroom that is welcoming to all students, establishing an effective 90-minute reading block, building parent engagement, and more.

Get ready for a really great school year. Find out what to look for during your school's open house and back-to-school night, tips for helping your child make a smooth transition from summer to school, how to establish homework routines, and even a booklist full of wonderful school-themed picture books to share.

As the final days of summer approach, is your child ready to head back to school? Creating a plan centered around health, school and homework, activities, and chores, will help your child find success.

Just as your children have schedules and expectations each day at school, it is important to have them at home as well. These five tips will jump-start your homework routine and make the process easier for everyone.

Helping children understand the concept of sequence develops both literacy and scientific inquiry skills. Here are a few simple activities that families can do together to give kids opportunities to observe, record, and think about sequencing.

Go on a "cooking" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Reading intervention programs play an important role in helping all students become confident, skilled readers. There are lots of programs available to schools. If you are planning to purchase an intervention program for instruction, it is important to do your homework — and get as much information as you can about a program's benefits and effectiveness. This article provides basic comparative information about a range of commercially available intervention programs.

Media-rich and interactive websites can play an essential role in science instruction. They can encourage students to think critically, by providing tools for modeling, visualization, and simulation tools; discussion and scaffolding; and data collection and analysis.

Using students' questions as a basis for investigations in science education is an effective teaching strategy. Not only do students pose questions they would like answered, but they are asked to find ways to answer them. This article also recommends nonfiction science books that use a question and answer format to find information and model how to communicate what you know.

Keeping a science notebook encourages students to record and reflect on inquiry-based observations, activities, investigations, and experiments. Science notebooks are also an excellent way for students to communicate their understanding of science concepts, and for teachers to provide students with feedback.

Learn more about how very young children acquire the language and phonemic awareness skills that will help them become strong readers, warning signs of delayed development, and how parents can support their child's literacy skills through meaningful conversation and read alouds.

Find tips on how to read with your child from the time he is born, learn how to build comprehension and critical thinking skills during read alouds, browse our book-centered activity packs, and discover links to dozens of themed book lists.

By reading and writing about the lives of real scientists, students can learn more about the nature and history of science and how important scientific discoveries were made. Students may also begin to see themselves as scientists by trying on scientists' lives for size.

When students practice observing in science, they use their senses to collect information about objects and events related to a question, topic, or problem to solve in science. Learn some strategies to help students organize and analyze their data through presentations, sharing, and discussion.

When fiction and nonfiction books are integrated into the teaching of a content area such as science, graphic organizers are useful for organizing information and enabling students to classify observations and facts, comprehend the relationships among phenomenon, draw conclusions, develop explanations, and generalize scientific concepts.

Inquiry-based, discovery-focused science instruction is widely viewed as best practice today. Students learn science best when it is integrated with other areas of the curriculum such as reading, language arts, and mathematics. This includes reading textbooks, newspapers, magazines, online information, and children's and young adult literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Children begin using their senses to recognize patterns and categorize things at a young age — skills that play an important role in early learning. This tip sheet provides some simple activities, as well as recommended books, that parents can use to help their kids build pattern recognition and categorization skills in science and math.

Go on an "ocean" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First Grade)

Thematic pairings of novels/short stories with movies can help students access difficult texts and can lead to deeper comprehension and lively classroom discussion. This article suggests pairings for some commonly assigned middle and high school texts.

The research is clear that children who don't read during the summer can lose up to three months of reading progress and that loss has a cumulative, long-term effect. The following resources and articles provide information about summer reading and summer learning loss. Plus you'll discover great activities to encourage kids to learn, read, and have fun in the summer sun.

Timelines are graphic representations of the chronology of events in time. While they are often used as a way to display information in visual form in textbooks as an alternative to written narrative, students can also become more actively engaged in learning the sequence of events in history by constructing timelines themselves.

Learning how to write individualized IEP goals is an important first step in developing your child's IEP. IEP goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, use action words, realistic, and time-limited) and based on research-based educational practice.

Go on a "rocks" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Reading Rockets has packed a "virtual beach bag" of activities for teachers to help families get ready for summer and to launch students to fun, enriching summertime experiences. Educators will find materials to download and distribute as well as ideas and resources to offer to students and parents to help ensure summer learning gain rather than loss.

Learn more about the English spelling system, how spelling supports reading, why children with dyslexia and dysgraphia struggle, which words should be taught, and instruction that works.

Young kids love technology, gadgets, and nature! While parents may be looking for ways to reduce screen time for their kids, here are a few helpful suggestions for integrating simple technology and books into your outdoor adventures in a fun and educational way.

This study of first and second graders looked at teacher-led read-alouds as a way to introduce science concepts. Results suggest that multiple exposures to a related concept across different stories gave students more time to build a mental representation of important ideas. This evidence suggests that moving beyond a single text as a source for building students' understanding is an important instructional approach.

What are some ways that we can gauge vocabulary development in the content areas? In this article, the authors explain how the intricacies of word knowledge make assessment difficult, particularly with content area vocabulary. They suggest ways to improve assessments that more precisely track students' vocabulary growth across the curriculum, including English language learners.

Science and math explorations provide your growing reader with a chance to record all kinds of observations. Young children love to keep a special journal, and fill it with all sorts of drawings, scribbles, sketches, notes, and graphs. Try these ideas and books, in addition to adding the date to each entry, and watch as your child's observational and recording skills grow along with your child.

Discover ways to support core literacy skills like vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and higher order thinking throughout content area instruction.

Learn about fluency assessment, the importance of fluency in building comprehension skills, finding the right book level for kids, effective classroom strategies like reader's theater and choral reading, and more.

Learn why phonological awareness is critical for reading and spelling, milestones for acquiring phonological skills, effective teaching strategies like rhyming games, how parents can help build skills, and more.

When working with struggling English language learners (ELLs), it's important to note that there are similarities among linguistic, cultural, and learning disability explanations for behaviors demonstrated by ELLs. This article can be used as a starting point for conversations regarding diverse learners who are struggling.

Hands-on measurement activities are fun to explore with children. Introduce your young learner to these interesting new vocabulary words and knowledge, and help your child develop an early love of measuring everything in sight!

If your child has ADHD, paying attention for long periods of time can be a challenge. So, meet the challenge head-on — make reading time fun time for you and your child.

You'll find sharing books together is a great way to bond with your son or daughter and help your child's development at the same time. Give your child a great gift that will last for life — the love of books.

You'll find sharing books together is a great way to bond with your son or daughter. Reading also helps your child's language development and listening skills when you talk about the story and ask questions. Large print books can help a child with mild to moderate vision loss discover the world of books and make tracking the words easier.

Cerebral palsy can cause difficulty with muscle tone and control. Your child may have delays speaking or have speech that is hard to understand. Reading with your child and having your child name objects in the book or read aloud to you can strengthen his speech skills. You'll find sharing books together is a great way to bond with your son or daughter and help your child's development at the same time.

Like all children, your child will learn and develop, yet she will likely develop more slowly than other children her age. Reading aloud and talking about the story and the pictures will help your child improve her vocabulary and help teach grammar. Here are some other tips to help your child enjoy books and reading.

Whether your child has mild or severe Autism Spectrum Disorder, making reading a fun activity can help your child's learning and social skills. You'll find sharing books together can be a good way to connect with your son or daughter. Reading also helps your child's language development and listening skills.

Children with speech and language problems may have trouble sharing their thoughts with words or gestures. They may also have a hard time saying words clearly and understanding spoken or written language. Reading to your child and having her name objects in a book or read aloud to you can strengthen her speech and language skills.

Learn more about how to increase higher order thinking, developing comprehension across the content areas, the value of read alouds, effective classroom strategies, and more.

Browse our resources about how to build academic language, the value of quality children's books, effective classroom strategies like word maps and semantic feature analysis, how parents can nurture vocabulary development at home, and more.

Alan Matan is the Department Chairman for ELL and Foreign Languages at Maine West High School in Des Plaines, Illinois. In this article written for Colorín Colorado, he explains the process by which his team created and implemented an RtI model designed to meet the needs of long-term ELLs

Browse our resources about the developmental stages of writing, effective classroom strategies, assessment, writing disabilities, supporting writing at home, and more.

Go on a "Lorax" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First Grade)

As a young reader, your child is learning to make predictions while reading which they can use to monitor their understanding of the story while thinking ahead to the next part. Scientists, just like readers, make predictions all the time. Help your child begin to see the connection between what she does as a reader and what she can do as a scientist. Below are two simple ways you can encourage your child to put her prediction skills to work as a scientist:

Many of the "tools" needed for science, math, and engineering exploration are right inside your home! Here are five ideas for putting everyday tools to work for some everyday fun:

Dr. Karen Ford provides Spanish/English dual-language practitioners with an overview of effective literacy instruction for young children. She includes strategies for supporting early bilingual literacy development, similarities and differences between the two languages and their alphabets, and guidelines for literacy assessment in the preschool classroom.

Help students internalize and routinize their reading comprehension monitoring with this sample lesson.

Learn more about the four recommended practices in Response to Intervention (RTI): universal screening; progress monitoring and differentiation; systematic skill instruction; and system-wide implementation.

Explore the five recommended practices for teaching literacy in English to English language learners: (1) Screen and monitor progress, (2) Provide reading interventions, (3) Teach vocabulary, (4) Develop academic English, and (5) Schedule peer learning.

The What Works Clearinghouse reviewed the research on two practices used in center-based settings with 3- to 5-year-old preK children, as well as a number of specific curricula. Positive results are shown for (1) Phonological awareness training and (2) Interactive and dialogic reading.

One way parents can help children become interested in science is by explaining the scientific process. The scientific process is the way scientists go about asking and answering scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments. Review the steps of the scientific process below, and learn how to incorporate your child into each one!

Reading in the "comfort zone" means that students read well enough to understand the text. Here's a simple technique that students can use to determine if a book is right for them.

Engaged, accountable reading requires students to interpret, and respond, often creatively. This article suggests several personalized ways to hold students accountable for their reading.

Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words. This article includes many of the most common examples.

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