Mrs. Pellin's Post
November 30th to December 4th

I am looking forward to seeing all of you at parent conferences this week. Remember there will be no school on Friday, December 4th.

This week we will be learning about words that have the short e sound in the beginning and middle of the word.

I will be using the Michael Heggerty skill based intervention this year with my first grade students. This intervention focuses on Phonemic awareness in its lesson plans. "Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, which are called phonemes. A child who is phonemically aware is able to isolate sounds, blend, and segment the sounds into spoken and written words." Studies have shown that this awareness is one key to active reading.

This year we will be studying 9 phonemic skills. These are (ranging from the easiest to the most difficult)
1. Increasing Language Awareness
2. Rhyming
3. Identifying Onsets
4. Blending
5. Identifying Final and Medial Phonemes
6. Segmenting
7. Substituting Phonemes
8. Adding Phonemes
9. Deleting Phonemes

During the next nine weeks I will describe each of the phonemic awareness skills.

9. Deleting Phonemes
a. Deleting words from compound words
b. Deleting syllables from spoken words
c. Deleting initial phonemes (sounds) to spoken words
d. Deleting final phonemes (sounds) to spoken words

Center Cass School District # 66 has implemented an Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) mandate, Response To Intervention (RTI). RTI is an array of procedures that can be used to determine if and how students respond to specific changes in instruction. RTI provides an improved process and instruction for school teams in designing and implementing educational interventions.