COUNSELOR'S CORNER

Dear Parent:

The school years will be some of the best years of your child’s life.  Your son or daughter will also be faced with many important decisions and possibly some difficult problems.

I want to share the good times with my students.  I have also been trained to help them through the rough times.

Please come in and let's get acquainted.  Together, we can help make your child’s school years “ the best of times.”

TESTING INFORMATION

GKAP-R
The primary purpose of the GKAP-R is to provide cumulative evidence of a student’s readiness for first grade. Thirty-two Georgia kindergarten Quality Core Curriculum (QCC) content standards are measured using performance-based assessment activities. Students are assessed in the domain areas of literacy, mathematics, and social/emotional development in a variety of one-on-one, small group, and large group instructional settings throughout the kindergarten year.

GKIDS
The Georgia Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (GKIDS) will be a performance-based assessment.  This assessment will replace GKAP – R in the fall of 2008.

DIBELS
The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS - given fall, winter and spring) are a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills.  The measures are linked to one another, both psychometrically and theoretically, and have been found to be predictive of later reading proficiency.

∑ Measures of Phonological Awareness:

    Initial Sounds Fluency (ISF): Assesses a child's skill to identify and produce the initial sound of a given word.

    Phonemic Segmentation Fluency (PSF):  Assesses a child's skill to produce the individual sounds within a given word.

∑ Measure of Alphabetic Principle:

    Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF):  Assesses a child's knowledge of letter-sound correspondences as well their ability to blend letters together to form unfamiliar "nonsense" (e.g., fik, lig, etc.) words.

∑ Measure of Fluency with Connected Text:

    Oral Reading Fluency (ORF):  Assesses a child's skill of reading connected text in grade-level material.
 
CRCT  - Grades 1 and 2
The CRCT are state-mandated achievement tests for students in grades 1 through 8.  The CRCT covers the subject areas of reading, English/language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Students in grades 1 and 2 do not take the CRCT in science and social studies.

What is the purpose of the CRCT?

The CRCT measures how well a student has acquired the knowledge and skills taught in the state curriculum.

The purposes of the tests are:
    (1)  to ensure students are learning at their grade level, and
    (2)  to provide data to teachers, schools, and school
districts in order to make better instructional decisions. The tests also serve as accountability measure and are part of the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). For more information on NCLB, visit www.ed.gov/nclb.

When do students take the CRCT?

Students will take the CRCT on the days specified by their local school system usually in April. Generally, the tests are administered over three consecutive days for first grade and second grade. Students are tested on one subject per day. Each subject has two test sections that last about 60 minutes each.
 
Other assessments given throughout the year:

STAR Early Literacy
STAR Reading
STAR Math


We cannot direct the wind … but we CAN adjust our sails.  (Unknown)