Bridging Home and School Literacy Practices: Empowering Families of Recent Immigrant Children

This article reports on a family literacy program that began with the creation and implementation of a Welcome Center in an elementary school in the Southwest United States. This center was intended to be a place where recent immigrant students and their families, teachers, as well as other community members, came together to participate in literacy activities. While serving the intended purposes, the Welcome Center also proved to be a useful venue for the recent immigrant students and their families to develop language and literacy. Overall, this report points to the need for schools to provide explicit spaces and planned opportunities for newcomers to meaningfully enter in dialogue with their new linguistic and cultural communities.