Mrs. Pellin's Post
March 8th to March 12th This week we will continue guided reading and Michael Haggerty, skill-based interventions. My four reading groups will each read a different story this week on topics including a family of owls, a babysitter, first aid, and a hungry kitten. Once again the students will write about what happened in the stories that they read. We will focus on the beginning, middle, and ending of each story.

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.