Mrs. Pellin's Post
April 12th to April 16th
I hope you and your families had a wonderful Spring Break! All of my reading groups will start a writing project about "Who am I?" The children will write clues about themselves and the parents will have to guess which project belongs to their child when they come to open house. The cildren have discussed the clues they are going to write and they are excited to share them with their families. The children will also continue to work on "Word Wall" words and we will play spelling games. The students are mastering many words from their "Word Wall" list.

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.