Learn how to involve the diverse families of English language learners with the effective, practical approaches in this book. This must-have resource for teachers and school leaders is packed with fresh ideas geared toward building a partnership between school communities and ELL families. The authors begin each chapter with realistic scenarios that commonly arise with ELL families. They offer activities designed to assess current practices, investigate family perceptions and expectations, overcome challenges, and improve communication. The strategies in this book help you engage families at school and at home in innovative and successful ways. Organized with the busy educator in mind, the book can be read straight through or section by section to best fit your specific needs. As a bonus, every chapter concludes with a wealth of useful resources on every topic! As the demographics of America's schools continue to grow and change, this book guides you to building a school community in which every family can thrive!

Learn how to engage the diverse families of English learners (ELs) and immigrants with the effective, practical approaches in this book. This must-have resource for teachers and school leaders is packed with fresh ideas geared toward building a partnership between school communities and ELs and immigrant families at school and at home. The book includes information and activities to: Assess current practices Investigate family perceptions and expectations Overcome challenges Improve communication Fund family engagement Fully revised and up-to-date, the new edition shines a much-needed spotlight on immigrant families from numerous homelands and includes a chapter on schools and organizations that have applied many of the ideas in the book for successful partnerships. New online resources include 20 new activities to complement the book chapters, over 50 annotated websites, and additional book recommendations to provide insight into the immigrant experience. The support materials can be found at routledge.com/9780367607548. Organized with the busy educator in mind, the book can be read straight through or section by section to best fit your specific needs. As the demographics of America's schools continue to grow and change, this book guides you to building an inclusive school community in which every family can thrive!

This book provides guidance and resources to help teachers communicate and collaborate with the families of Latino English Language Learners (ELLs). Practical tips and tools, including reproducible form letters in English and Spanish, are provided to help teachers solicit valuable information about students from their families, extend families' knowledge of how U.S. schools operate, and provide families with ideas for helping students with their schoolwork at home.

This work is a report on the positive impact of parental involvement on their child's academics and on the school at large. Building Parent Engagement in Schools is an introduction to educators, particularly in lower-income and urban schools, who want to promote increased parental engagement in both the classroom and at home—an effort required by provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It is both an authoritative review of research that confirms the positive impact of parental involvement on student achievement and a guide for implementing proven strategies for increasing that involvement. With Building Parent Engagement in Schools, educators can start to develop a hybrid culture between home and school, so that school can serve as a cultural bridge for the students. Filled with the voices of real educators, students, and parents, the book documents a number of parent-involved efforts to improve low-income communities, gain greater resources for schools, and improve academic achievement. Coverage includes details of real initiatives in action, including programs for home visits, innovative uses of technology, joint enterprises like school/community gardens, and community organization efforts.

"Nessel and Dixon show teachers how to effectively support English language development by using the Language Experience Approach." —David E. Freeman and Yvonne S. Freeman, Professors of Literacy, ESL, and Bilingual Education The University of Texas at Brownsville "Provides the tools teachers need to use this natural way of helping English Language Learners. The Language Experience Approach makes language and language arts accessible to the students in need of basic skills." —Roberta E. Dorr, Associate Professor of Education Trinity University, WA Support ELLs while meeting the goals of your literacy curriculum! English Language Learners (ELLs) enter the classroom with different levels of proficiency—and confidence—in English. The Language Experience Approach offers K–12 teachers an instructional framework and classroom strategies for meeting students at their level and helping them use their strengths as speakers and listeners to build reading and writing skills. Research-based and used successfully in practice, this method actively engages students by allowing them to construct their own texts and bring their personal experiences into the learning process. The authors: Offer detailed, step-by-step directions for using the Language Experience Approach in English language instruction Include examples of the kinds of texts that are generated by ELL students Describe activities teachers can use with those texts to refine and extend learners′ literacy skills Appropriate for teaching students at varying levels of English proficiency, Using the Language Experience Approach With English Language Learners is a valuable reference for teachers, literacy coaches, and reading specialists.

Learn how to involve the diverse families of English language learners with the effective, practical approaches in this book. This must-have resource for teachers and school leaders is packed with fresh ideas geared toward building a partnership between school communities and ELL families. The authors begin each chapter with realistic scenarios that commonly arise with ELL families. They offer activities designed to assess current practices, investigate family perceptions and expectations, overcome challenges, and improve communication. The strategies in this book help you engage families at school and at home in innovative and successful ways. Organized with the busy educator in mind, the book can be read straight through or section by section to best fit your specific needs. As a bonus, every chapter concludes with a wealth of useful resources on every topic! As the demographics of America's schools continue to grow and change, this book guides you to building a school community in which every family can thrive!

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.