Mrs. Pellin's Post
January 18th to January 22nd

Remember January 18th is Martin Luther King's Birthday. There will be no school.

This week I will be introducing the "guided reading" intervention to my program. "Guided reading" allows the students to read stories that are appropriate for their current reading level. The students will be reading a book about a boy named Tom and his adventures with a skateboard. They will also be reading a story about how Tom likes to play soccer with his dad. We will be writing a breif summary about the stories we read. We will continue ot add words to our "word wall."

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 the 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

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.