Red Mill 1st Grade Teacher Valerie Santillo, dressed as Cruella de Vil, works with students during Dalmatian-themed literacy stations on the 101st day of school.
Visit our Facebook page to see inside the classroom of Red Mill 1st Grade Teacher Valerie Santillo. Students (and Mrs. Santillo) celebrated the 101st day of school this year on Thursday by participating in Dalmatian-themed literacy stations. The students wore Dalmatian hats that they made and some added paper spots to their clothes while Mrs. Santillo dressed as Cruella de Vil.
Students rotated through different stations that included reading to each other, organizing jumbled up words into sentences (“The dogs hide from Cruella.”), working in the app Lalileo on their chromebooks to measure their learning, and writing reflections.
At Mrs. Santillo’s table, she worked with three students at a time to review the phonics skill of the week (r-controlled vowel sound “OR”). Students used magnets to build words and white boards and markers to spell words and sentences.
“My classroom is run based on structured literacy principles,” said Mrs. Santillo. “These stations are in addition to another 30-45 minutes of ELA instruction in whole group covering: phonemic awareness, phonics, and writing. We use the chromebooks everyday and on Mondays through Thursdays, the children use the app Lalileo, which accompanies Renaissance (the program we use for universal screening and curriculum based measures) so I can see how the students are doing, create assignments, and then plan my Tier 2 instruction based on need.”
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