Colorín Colorado

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Oct 31, 2025, 6:40 PM

This article highlights the diverse leadership experiences of ELL educators and shares ideas for identifying and honing your own leadership capacity. Do you know a teen reader who loves a scary story? These books highlight the things that can make someone feel welcome in a new place. These stories for middle grades are set in schools across the country. Welcome to the newly updated Colorín Colorado website! Our new site has all of the great content you know and love, and many of the links from the former site have been redirected so that you can find the pages you have...

(If you can’t find a page or see something that needs our attention, just send us an e-mail and we’ll do our best to fix it!) To take a brief tour of the new site, take a look at this video! We look forward to hearing your feedback about the new site at: [email protected]. This project could not have happened without the long-time support of the American Federation of Teachers and our more recent partnership with the National Education Association. Thanks to the AFT & NEA for making this happen! We’ll keep you posted as we add great new resources and features!

This section provides specific ideas and strategies to support ELLs' language and literacy development, such as tips for planning lessons and the use of language objectives, as well as broader approaches such as using... For more ideas, see our ELL Classroom Strategy Library! Learn how educators can support the success of their English language learners (ELLs). They will be useful for a wide range of audiences, including new and veteran teachers of ELLs, paraprofessionals, tutors, and administrators at the school and district level. When planning a lesson for a class that includes English language learners (ELLs), it may be difficult to know how to help students at different language levels participate fully in the activities. However, there are a number of steps you can take to help strengthen students' language development and engage them, no matter their level of language proficiency.

There are a number of ways to support, or scaffold, instruction for ELLs, even if they are at beginning levels of English proficiency. These ideas from veteran educators can help make content more accessible and provide students with an opportunity to participate in all classroom activities. Colorín Colorado is the premier national website serving educators and families of English language learners (ELLs) in Grades PreK-12. Colorín Colorado has been providing free research-based information, activities, and advice to parents, schools, and communities around the country for more than a decade. Learn more about our mission to serve ELLs as well as the team that makes Colorín Colorado possible below. Colorín Colorado is an educational service of WETA, the flagship public broadcasting station in the nation's capital, and receives major funding from the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association.

The name "Colorín Colorado" comes from a playful phrase that is often said at the end of stories in Spanish-speaking countries: "¡Y Colorín Colorado, este cuento se ha acabado!" or "¡Y Colorín Colorado, este... The saying brings back happy childhood memories of storytelling and reading for generations of people from many different countries. Making people smile about reading seemed like a perfect way to introduce our project. Our Colorín Colorado resource library is filled with tools and materials that you can use in the classroom, with parents, and for your own professional development! These resources include tip sheets, research reports, recommended websites, resources organized by state, and much more. We also highly recommended the following resources:

There are many different ways multilingual families can support their child's literacy, education, and social-emotional health. These resources, available in multiple languages, offer tips and ideas to try at home! Learn how families can support literacy at home, whether their children are babies, toddlers, preschoolers, or in elementary school. These tips are available in 13 languages. Colorín Colorado and the American Federation of Teachers have collaborated to develop tip sheets focused on reading instruction for educators of English language learners in grades 4-12. Colorín Colorado is the premier national website serving parents and teachers of English language learners (ELLs) in Grades PreK-12.

Over the past decade, Colorín Colorado has established itself as a trusted leader in addressing the urgent challenge of helping ELLs around the country succeed. We are currently on track to serve more than 2 million unique visitors this year in English and Spanish. One reason for our continued growth is that English language learners now comprise an estimated 10% of the K-12 U.S. school population and their numbers have grown dramatically in the last twenty years. As demographics change nationwide, teaching ELLs has become a fact of life for schools everywhere: in big cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural communities. Yet ELLs, who often come from low-income households and attend schools with limited resources, are among the most under-served students in our school system.

Many teachers have received little or no training in how to work effectively with ELLs, how to accurately identify their students' abilities and academic needs, and how to communicate with ELL parents. A majority of teachers acknowledge that they need much more information and support in meeting the complex needs of these students and their families. Families, on the other hand, may be limited in their experience with the U.S. school system, may not feel welcome at school, or may be juggling multiple jobs during peak "parent involvement" hours. To support these educators and parents, Colorín Colorado offers free multimedia materials such as classroom videos, toolkits, research-based articles, multilingual tip sheets, newsletters, featured books and authors, and social media. We provide information about topics such as reading together at home, creating a welcoming classroom environment, and helping ELLs meet the new Common Core State Standards.

Colorín Colorado is a bilingual website in English and Spanish -- and we offer basic parent content in thirteen languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and Hmong. The site has become a lifeline for the teachers and parents of ELLs, and we hear every day from audience members telling us that we're making a difference, including this comment: "Colorín Colorado is... It offers guidance, support and excellent strategies that teachers should use and that will benefit all students." This section includes a number of resources focused on English Language Learners (ELLs) in middle and high school. Topics include reading instruction for older students, content instruction, social and emotional issues, and college readiness. To see great ELL instruction in middle and high school classrooms, take a look at our classroom video library!

Washington’s schools are home to over 130,000 English language learners. In recent years, the most common five languages spoken by ELLs in Washington have been Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Somali, and Chinese. (U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics) Note: For additional state-by-state data and information, see New America's English Learner Accountability Hub.

Note: Regulations change with time. If you see something that needs updating, please send an e-mail to Colorín Colorado. For more detailed information regarding ELL guidelines and policies at the state and federal levels, please see the following: U.S. Department of Education. Our Nation’s English Learners.

Colorín Colorado

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