001Okay. Um, good evening everyone and welcome to the May 7th, 2026 meeting of the Cohassid School Committee. Would all members who are present please indicate so in roll call. Mr. Carr Carr I. Mr. Dial uh Dial I S is not present. Mr. Leki present. Chair is present giving us a quorum of four members. I will officially call the meeting to order. Would all those who are able please rise for the recitation of our nation's pledge of allegiance and maybe our kindergarteners and Mr. So you can help us with that. Whenever you guys ready to United States of America and to the republic for it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you guys. Great job. All right, just a reminder at the outset that this meeting is being uh
002broadcast on Coast 143TV. It's being uh live streamed on Facebook and you can participate virtually by utilizing the link that appears at the top of the agenda logging on to Zoom and you may uh use a Q&A feature to let us know what is on your mind. Um the first agenda item is always uh public comment and this is the section agenda that's reserved for members of our community to share their thoughts on something that is not already on the agenda. If you have a question or comment about something that is on the agenda, just please wait until we arrive at that point in the meeting and then we're going to be more than happy to hear from you. So, I'll just give everyone at home a few minutes to generate any comments using the
003Q&A feature on Zoom. And I think most of the visitors in person are here for uh our exciting presentation that's up next. But if you have something to say, surely raise your hand, let us know. Just ask that anyone that is participating in tonight's meeting at any time, whether it's public comment or otherwise, to simply state their full name and residential address. that is so that we can keep an accurate record of the meeting. All right, I am not seeing any questions or comments uh virtually, nor do I see any hands raised. So, we'll just move right into the invited guest section of our agenda. And uh I think what I'll do is turn it over to our superintendent of schools to introduce our visitors for the first uh for the first segment of this
004agenda block. Superintendent Shannon. Great. Thank you. So, we are very excited tonight. Um, we have Miss Owen Rippy, one of our kindergarten teachers, here with six of our kindergarten students. Um, and they are here to show off their literacy skills. Um, we have several programs that make up our literacy program in general. Um, two of those components are foundations and heard. And we a couple years ago showed in a school committee meeting the um the literature piece of the programming. And so tonight is about the phonics. And so I would invite Miss Rudy and our students to come to the middle of the room to show off your skills. Come on around here this way, guys. So impressed. It's such a long day of learning. These guys can sit right there on the floor just
005like just as though you had a rug in your classroom. You know how you all sit certainly. Maybe a little closer to closer to you guys get to see yourselves on TV. Exciting, right? Oh, you can see yourself. Fantastic. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Um, our kindergarteners are very excited to be able to show you the hands-on engaging learning programs that we are using at Ozgood, namely Hegy and Foundation. So, we're going to start the lesson with Hegy and Heggerity is a phmic awareness program and our students know it as basically word games. So what we do with these word games is students learn to um segment sounds, blend sounds, manipulate sounds, which are all very critical skills for reading. Okay, are we ready? Okay, so we're going to start with our first
006game is going to be I'm going to say some sounds, then you'll say the sounds, and then you'll blend them together to say the word. Ready with your choppers? Okay, here we go. C- cur. Very good. Next word. SW. Your turn. W. The next word. Wish. Excellent. Very good. And let's try one with a long sound. Ready? A d. Nice job. Okay. Our next game is going to be I'll say a word, you'll say a word, and then we're going to find the middle sound of that word. That's where mine is. Okay. Ready? Here we go. Say code. Roller coaster. Say O. O. Oh, I hear a long vowel sound there. Good job. Next word. Say hi. Hi. I love vowel sound. Here we go. Say e. Long vowels in a row. Last one. Say
007date. Date. Someone chop everybody. Really good word. This time I'm going to say the word and you'll say the word. You'll chop each sound in the word. You ready? Say much. Much. Here you go. Excellent. Very nice. Next word is spy. Spy. Say spy. Let's chop it. I spy. Spine. Yeah. Think about the sounds in that. S I think about how many sounds each word. Say rich. Rich. Let's chop it. This time say touch. Touch. Chocolate. Touch. Good. Last one. Say scope. Scope. Ready. O. So, some words with three sounds and some words with four sounds. Great. In our next game, I'm going to say a word, then we'll add a new sound to the end of the word and make a new word. Are you ready? Say store. Store. Add. The new word is
008store. Say freeze. Freeze. Add z. And the new word is say cry. Cry. Add. Cry. Very good. Say one. One. S at the end. And the new word is excellent. Nice job everyone. This time we're going to say I'm gonna say a word and then I'm gonna ask you to say it without the last sound. We'll make a different word. Say grape. Great. Without the what's left is great. Say free. Free. Try that one more time. Say freeze. Without the what's left is that happens sometimes. Say tried. Without the Z, what's left is subscribe. Say once. Without the S. What's left is one. Fantastic. Nice job. All right. Now, let's get our word changing machines ready. Ready? We're going to be changing the last sound of the word. Say hen. Change the N to D.
009And the new word is. Let's think about say hen. Let's change the M to D. And then head. Good. Say we change the P to And the new word is say word. Word. Change the D to C. And the new word is work. Work. Work. Work. Good job everybody. That was excellent. Okay, good job guys. It's very complex. We're at the end of the year now. It's very complex. So, we're going to move on to a little bit of a foundations lesson next. And in foundations, our students learn the relationship between letters and sounds. You can see with Hegy, students aren't seeing any words. It's all done by hearing the words. So, we're going to be looking at some letters, thinking about the sounds, and then using those skills to blend and read some words.
010We're going to start with practicing a few sounds that are going to be really helpful. Are you ready for some letters, key words, and sounds, everybody? All right, let's start with some letters. Here we go. Xbox. Your turn. Xbox. U up. A apple a apple a I itch it I itch it to you queen to you queen octopus a otopus a n Good job. Let's try some. Ready? SH ship ship sh WH whistle whistle ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch chin ch ch h ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch chin ch th ch thumb thumb ch thumb c k k k k k k k k k
011k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k k so sock, c k sock. Excellent. You might be seeing some of those when we read and spell some words. Let me give everybody magnetic cutter board. Ready? Go. Open up your ready. We're going to build a word for the sounds, blend them together, and read that word just like we do in our classroom. Okay, here comes our first word. We'll just spell it for you. Everyone find the W part of your word. Let's find a right in the middle of the word. So we have our beginning letter, our ending letter, our middle letter. Let's find X for our ending letter. Okay, get our pointer
012power ready. Excellent job. Nice. All right. Real word or not real word? Which one? Wax is a real word, right? H. Maybe we should try something else. Okay. Ready? Find L. L. Find E. Put that as the middle letter. Let's find the diagraph. C A end of the word. Stop. Let's get our pointer power ready. We're sliding through these sounds. I don't know that word. Do you know that word? I bet if we change one of the letters, we should make it into a real word, right? We do that sometimes in our room. All right, let's go ahead and erase. This time we're going to use our letter boards to help us. We're learning also learning to spell words. So, we're going to use our letterboard to help us spell words. Are we ready everybody?
013The first word we're going to spell is rush. Take your time. No need to rush. So, let's get our choppers ready. We're going to chop all the sounds in rush. Ready? Okay. Okay. Now, first job is to think about hm what's the letter that goes with the sound. When you find it, put it the beginning of your word. Good. Okay, let's chop again. Say rush. Rush. Now, we have to think about what is the letter that goes with the a sound. Good. Nice job. Ah, which letter says ah. Okay, chop one more time, everybody. A brush. I see people checking their diraphs. Excellent. Put that right at the end of the word. Fantastic. Hey, how did you spell it? Can you read the names of the letters? R U S H. Nice job with diraph.
014Okay, let's slide through the sounds and make sure we spelled it right. Nice job, everybody. Excellent. All right, let's try one more word. This time it's not going to