Mrs. Pellin's Post
October 12th to October 15th

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.
This week my first grade students will be reading a story about a lost little dragon. We will work on reading fluency, accuracy and comprehension skills while reading this story. They will learn how to retell the beginning, middle, and end of this story verbally and in written form. We will also learn how to make word plural by adding the ending "s" or"es.
My second grade students will have a "Reading/Writing Workshop" this week. They will be writing a descriptive paragraph about a Halloween costume that they hope to wear this year. The paragraph will have an opening statement, four descriptive sentences, and a closing statement. The students will learn to indent when starting a paragraph.

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.

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.