Mrs. Pellin's Post
November 15th to November 19th

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 grader students will be reading a story about a visit to an aquarium. They will write a description of their favorite fish in the story.Our phonics lesson will concentrate on long vowel sounds which use the consonant vowel consonant pattern "CVCe." This pattern is found in the following words make, cake, game, plane, and same.

Second grade: The second grade students will be reading a story about a grandmother and her grandson going to the market in Chinatown. They will write about all the different places the two of them visited in Chinatown. We will discuss and write about the similarities and differences between the Chinese and American
cultures. Mrs. Nessling will be returning on Wednesday, November 17th and she will begin working with my second grade students. I have enjoyed reading with these wonderful students this fall so much and I am so proud of all of their accomplishments.

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.