Mrs. Pellin's Post
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.
First grade: The first graders will learn to use the digraph "sh," "th," and "wh." They will look at picture cards that begin with each digraph and also write words on their own that have these digraphs. They will be reading a book about a farm whose main character is a pig. They will write about the problem in the story and how it was resolved.

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.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.