Mrs. Pellin's Post
May 10th to May 14th
I would like to wish all of my students moms a very "Happy Mother's Day!"

This week the students will be reading a book about a family moving to a new house. Their family cat runs away once they are settled into their new home. Please ask your child where the family eventually finds their cat called Tiger. The students will predict where the cat went and then they will write a summary of the entire story.

All of the students have done such a great job mastering their "word wall" words. They will write sentences that will include many of these words this week.

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.