Mrs. Pellin's Post
May 2nd to May 6th

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 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.

Kindergarten: The students will be reviewing letter recognition and letter sounds for the entire alphabet. Students will be asked to view a picture card and then say the letter name and associated letter sound.

First Grade: The students will be reading a story about a family moving into a new house. We will discuss how the family makes new friends in their new neighborhood. We will write about how each of us can make a new student feel welcome in our school. We will continue to work on both sight and vocabulary words.

I will also be using an intervention called "GATE (Group and Tutoring Edition)" with the first 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.