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Each year, the United States celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15. This heritage month recognizes Hispanic Americans and their ancestors for their contributions to the history, culture, and achievements of our country. We at Read Naturally are honored to celebrate Hispanic Americans and their ancestors. Many Hispanic American students are multilingual learners for whom Spanish is their primary language. To meet these students’ needs, we developed Read Naturally Live—Español.  

Comprehension gives the act of reading a purpose and opens the door to enjoyment of reading. Indeed, deriving meaning from text is why we bother reading at all! Yet comprehension can be a struggle for any student, but often it’s especially challenging for multilingual students. What can we do to set them up for success in Read Naturally Live and Read Naturally Live—Español?

We hope that you and your students will enjoy these new printables: updated labels, a weekly story tracker, a difficult word list, and blank graphs for Read Naturally Live.

After a challenge is identified, one of two things tends to happen: either the challenge grows, or it shrinks. The challenge tends to grow if the solution is unknown and hard to find. Conversely, it tends to shrink if there is a tried-and-true, high-quality solution at the ready. As you know, struggling readers fare best if there’s a clear and effective way to help them move forward. For thousands of schools, that way forward is Read Naturally.

About 5 million public school students in the United States today are English Language Learners (ELLs). National Public Radio (NPR) recently conducted a robust research project entitled 5 Million Voices, which set out to discover who these students are and how our public schools are serving them.

Learning to decode words is a difficult skill in its own right. ELL students have the added challenge of learning this skill in a nonnative language. It goes without saying that these students need lots of extra support. What should this support look like?

The inclusion of our Idioms series in the latest Read Live release is a significant upgrade to the program. Are you wondering why and how to take advantage of this new content? Here’s what you need to know:

Some ELL students learning to read in English may need additional support in the Read Along step of Read Naturally Strategy programs. We've built this extra support into many of our levels for Spanish-speaking ELL students.

Educators around the country—and around the world—are finding that Read Naturally programs work wonders with ELL students. The audio support, student-friendly vocabulary definitions, and high-interest story topics are just a few of the features that make our programs an ideal fit for this population. We love when ELL students learn to read English fluently with Read Naturally programs—and we love when educators take the time to share this progress. ELL instructor Kristina Hasanova is one such educator.

I've spent the past five years obsessed with the creation of Funēmics, and I've talked about it quite a bit with my family members, who collectively speak five languages and have lived in six different countries on four continents.

I grew up as an American in Saudi Arabia, and my family was part of a global community called ex-patriots—whatever that means. For us, it meant that when my sister Erica graduated from college, she moved to Florence, Italy; when my brother Patrick fell in love, it was with a Swedish girl in Rome; and when my Dad remarried, it was to a beautiful woman from Ecuador. More conventionally, I found a hockey player from northern Minnesota, but he happened to live in Aschaffenburg, Germany.

Make Your Student a STAR!

Read Naturally Star of the Month​Share your student’s success story—nominate him or her for our Star of the Month award. Win a Barnes & Noble gift card for the student and a Read Naturally gift certificate for your class!

pointer Submit a Star-of-the-Month entry

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