Mrs. Southard and Mrs. Yarbrough's Class

Mrs. Southard

I am originally from Long Island, New York. I attended Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where I received a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education, Middle Grades and a Reading Endorsement.  I have been married to my husband Jimmy for almost 22 years.  We have two wonderful children, Cameron and Matthew and a "four legged" child, Harley Grace.  I am excited to begin my twenty-third year of teaching and my fifth year at GBE! I am grateful for the opportunity to work with you and your child this year!

Mrs. Yarbrough

The GKIDS Readiness Check Parent Resource Website is now available!

http://gkidsreadinesscheck.gadoe.org/

The GKIDS Readiness Check is a new component of the Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (GKIDS). It is designed to be administered during the first six weeks of the kindergarten year. The GKIDS Readiness Check is aligned to the Georgia Early Learning and Development Standards (GELDS​) and correlated to the state mandated content standards for kindergarten. The goal of the assessment is to provide information about the skills of students entering kindergarten. 

Purpose

The Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (GKIDS) is a performance based assessment. The goal of the assessment program is to provide teachers with information about the level of instructional support needed by individual students. GKIDS allows teachers to assess student performance during instruction, record student performance in an on-line database, and generate customized reports for instructional planning, report cards, and/or parents. Throughout the year, teachers may assess students and record GKIDS data based on their system’s curriculum map or report card schedule. At the end of the year, the GKIDS data collection system automatically generates summary reports and individual student reports based on the data the teacher has entered throughout the year.

The primary purpose of GKIDS is to provide ongoing diagnostic information about kindergarten students’ developing skills in language arts, math, science, social studies, social/emotional development, approaches to learning, and motor skills. GKIDS also provides a summary of student performance at the end of the kindergarten school year. GKIDS serves both a formative and summative role in assessing kindergarten students.

The end-of-the-year summary report includes the domains of ELA, Math, Approaches to Learning, and Social/Emotional Development. Throughout the school year, teachers may use GKIDS to observe and record student performance in each content area specified in the CCGPS (ELA and Mathematics) and GPS (Science and Social Studies), Approaches to Learning, Social/Emotional Development, and Physical/Motor Development.

Domains Included on the End-of-the-Year Summary Report are ELA, Math, Approaches to Learning, Social and Emotional Development. The CCGPS/GPS content area standards and skills/elements are assessed using the following performance levels:

Not Yet Assessed

Not Yet Demonstrated

Emerging

Developing

Demonstrating

             Exceeding

Some skills/elements in the CCGPS/GPS do not elicit a range of student performance sufficient to warrant five performance levels. Therefore, some CCGPS/GPS skills/elements are assessed using only two, three, or four of the performance levels shown above. For example, the skill associated with one CCGPS/GPS standard may require only the “Not Yet Demonstrated” and the “Meets the Standard” levels for assessment.