Mrs. Pellin's Post
September 13th to September 17th

The Response to Intervention (RTI) team has completed assessing Elizabeth Ide students and will begin to accept students this Monday, September 13th. The RTI program applies interventions carefully designed to meet the specific needs of each student. Each week I will reinforce the reading and writing skills taught in the first and second grade Houghton Mifflin core curriculum. We will focus on vocabulary, comprehension, high-frequency words and phonics skills associated with the stories that are read in the students' classrooms.

The first grade students will be reading a story called "My Cat." We will concentrate on the vowel sound "a" and the consonant sound "c."

I will also be using an intervention called "GATE (Group and Tutoring Edition)" with the first and second grade students. This intervention extends the Read Naturally strategy to improve phonics and fluency skills in small group situations. It is an interactive approach to teaching phonics skills. The phonics skills are improved by the following:

1. Developing phonemic awareness of the letter sounds in words.
2. Developing the phonemic awareness of blending sounds in words.
3. Strengthening the proficiency with the sounds of the letters.
4. Teaching to decode short, phonetically regular words.
5. Building fluency in decoding.
6. Spelling short, phonetically regular words.

By combining phonics instruction with the fluency building GATE for Phonics accelerates the reading achievement of beginning readers.

Center Cass School District # 66 has implemented an Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) mandate, Response To Intervention (RTI). RTI is an array of procedues 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.