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Academics » Kindergarten

Kindergarten

Welcome to Maxwell Elementary Kindergarten! Kindergarten means "child's garden." The purpose of the new kindergarten is to teach children a rich, meaningful, and balanced curriculum of skills and information through age-appropriate activities that encourage children to want to learn more.
 
Kindergarten teaches cooperation: the ability to work, learn, and get along with others. A year in kindergarten provides children with the opportunity to learn patience, as well as the ability to take turns, share, and listen to others — all skills needed through school years and beyond.
 
To Participate: children must be FIVE years of age on or before September 1 of the school year and must be a resident of McDuffie County. 
 
REQUIRED DOCUMENTS to enroll are in the attachment BELOW.
 

Documentation for Homeless Students – Homeless students, as defined by the McKinney-Vento Act, shall be enrolled immediately with full participation in school activities, regardless of whether required documentation can be provided at the time of enrollment. The designated employee responsible for care of homeless students shall assist the person enrolling the homeless student or the unaccompanied youth in acquiring the necessary documents for enrollment in accordance with the requirements of the state enrollment rule and the Act.

“The School District, in its enrollment procedures, requirements and process does not and will not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, or immigration status.”

Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (GKIDS 2.0)
 
GKIDS 2.0 is a progression-based formative assessment, integrated into classroom work, that is aligned to the Georgia Standards of Excellence (GSE). GKIDS 2.0 is organized around big ideas and learning progressions. 
 
  • ​A big idea describes the integration of concepts and skills from the kindergarten standards that are most important for success in first grade. 
  • A learning progression shows where the student is in the learning continuum of content and reasoning development regarding the big idea from the GSE.
    • Learning progressions provide the big picture of what is to be learned across the year, relate increased reasoning of standards within the grade and across grades, and support instructional planning. 
GKIDS 2.0 provides teachers with one source of real-time information to adjust instruction, by identifying what a student already knows, what the student needs next, and by allowing the teacher to monitor growth. 
 
 
Basic Literacy Test (BLT)
 
Basic Literacy Test (BLT)- used to determine a student's instructional reading level. It is given 3 times a year and assesses phonemic awareness ( is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in words), phonics (the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language), sight words (words that should be memorized and instantly recalled) and comprehension (making sense of word knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, background knowledge and text structure to understand the meaning of the text.)