Mrs. Pellin's Post
March 22nd to March 26th
This week we will continue guided reading and Michael Heggerty, skill-based interventions. My four reading groups will each read a story this week on topics including a little boy who can't find his teddy bear, a little girl who likes to see birds, and where different animals keep their eggs. This week the students will write about their favorite character or part of the 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.