Mrs. Pellin's Post
October 25th to October 29th

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.

First grade: The first graders will be sorting word families that have the short "u" sound. They will be making columns of short "u" chunks that have the same ending. For instance hut, cut, rut, and gut would be in one column and bun, sun, run, and fun would be in another column. They will be reading about a bug who makes a home in a rug.

Second grade: I will not be seeing my second grade students this week because I will be helping the second grade teachers administer the "MAPS" test. Please encourage you children to read at home every night.

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.