ELL News Headlines

With more than 600,000 Houston-area students set to return to the classroom Monday, teachers and school officials wonder how many will show up - and if they'll be ready to learn. And at some schools, business as usual will be a distant memory.

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that DACA would be rescinded, Latino USA asked listeners to share their reactions. They opened our phone lines and asked listeners how Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals had changed their opportunities for higher education and work.

In Highline Public Schools, district officials have set an ambitious goal of graduating all students as bilingual by 2026. There’s at least one big hurdle to making that happen: Where do you find enough bilingual educators to teach those students in multiple languages?

In the age of standardized testing, screen time and what some see as a generation of excessively coddled children, a new movement of preschools is pushing kids outdoors, come rain or shine, heat or cold, to connect with nature and learn to take measured risks, in addition to math and the ABCs. Jeffrey Brown reports from Midland, Michigan.

Education professor Xia Chao, an education researcher awarded by the American Educational Research Association and the Literacy Research Association, is working on a new project involving ESL students in the Pittsburgh area called Savings Stories. Saving Stories is a collaborative effort by Baldwin-Whitehall teacher Renee Christman and Paul Kelly, librarian at Whitehall Public Library, to turn stories from local refugee families into bilingual picture books.

This gorgeous tale about a father/son fishing trip shows the interconnectedness of family and the inexorable way that generational history impacts the present. The story is told from the boy's perspective, as his father wakes him long before dawn to go fishing… The quiet time together provides opportunities for the man to talk about his past life fishing with his brother in a different pond in Vietnam, long ago before the war and before coming to America. After they return home, triumphant, with a bucket of fish, the boy contemplates his role as the youngest in the family — no longer a baby — and even though he is sad that both his parents have to work, he knows there will be a happy, love-filled family dinner later that night.

The Trump administration ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects nearly 800,000 undocumented youth from deportation. The announcement places a new pressure on Congress to add immigration reform to their fall legislative docket. John Yang reports on the decision and the reaction from so-called “dreamers,” who are taking to the street to protest.

I’m writing this blog on the floor of an empty house in Northwest Houston. Hurricane Harvey has finally moved off to the east. I teach students who have recently relocated to our city.  My NELD classes (Newcomer English Language Development) are students who were attending U.S. schools for only a few days when this hurricane struck. Many are coming from places of war, others have moved to Houston for a better life from Latin American countries and still, others have relocated here with family because my school is located in an Oil and Gas corridor. So what will I do for my class? I’m still deciding on all the particulars of the lessons but I know what my overarching theme will be for this first unit.

Juana la Iguana, an entertainment and learning platform that instills educational and global values to children in Spanish and English, has announced that it was selected by the prestigious Miami Children's Museum to debut its new musical, The Mystery of Musical Notes.

Joseph Maghamez is planning to spend the rest of his life in Canada, but he still doesn't want to waste any time. After arriving from Syria last year, Maghamez, 20, has been focused on getting into university as quickly as possible. "It was my first priority," he said in an interview with CBC Toronto. And next week, it will be a reality when Maghamez begins studying life sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga.