November 1st to November 5th
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.


Second grade: The second grade students will be taking "Theme Unit" tests this week. These tests will cover the stories that they have read in their core curriculum. We will read a story about animals that live near a pond. The students will compare and contrast the traits of these animals.
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. The fluency 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.
