October 24, 2025

FUN FARM FRIDAY

The kindergartners had a great time on Friday celebrating the end of our farm unit.  Thank you to our wonderful PTA for providing a pizza party lunch and snack for the students!  We heard from several students that it was the "BEST DAY ever!"  

📚 Dress as Your Favorite Storybook Character Day and Parade

    Friday, October 31st 📚

To celebrate our love of reading, students are invited to come dressed as their favorite storybook character! Be creative and have fun bringing a favorite story to life.

Please remember:

• No masks, face paint or colored hair

• No toy weapons

• Wear shoes suitable for school activities
  
  

We can’t wait to see all the wonderful characters roaming our halls!  Parents are welcome to join us and watch the parade!

WHAT A BUSY WEEK!

Before we left the farm, we stopped to visit with the Little Red Hen. We read different versions of the story and looked for similarities and differences between them. We had some good conversations about the importance of cooperation and why the little red hen should or should not have shared her bread - or pizza! We continued to work on listening for beginning and ending sounds in words and finding words that begin or end with the same sound.  In math, the students worked on making combinations to 10 and addition. We continue to work on counting from 1 - 100 and backwards from 20 to 1. 

BOOK BAGS

On Friday, some students brought home their reading bag with four books in it. Please have your child read each of these books daily. These books are on your child’s independent reading level, which s/he should be able to read with 90% accuracy. Some books may seem too easy for your child, but we want them to practice reading the books fluently (reading like they talk) with few errors. Reading independent level books also helps build your child’s confidence.

Some of the reading strategies for students to use:

• Point to each word (very important for beginning readers)

• Use the pictures for clues

• Go back and re-read

• Look at the beginning letter(s)

Here are some additional ways to use these books after reading them:

• · Read the pictures to tell the story

• · Look for word wall words

• · Retell the story – what happened in the beginning, middle and end

• · Ask how this story relates to real life; can they make any connections

Your child will need to return the bag every Friday and s/he will get four new books. Please have your child keep the reading bag in their backpacks when they are not reading them. If we need to switch out books on a different day, their bag will be here. This will also help minimize the chance of any books getting lost, as there is a $10.00 fee for each lost book. Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to watching our readers grow.

If your child did not bring home any books, they will be bringing them home by the beginning of November.  

1st Nine Weeks SBRC Rubric

This year our GCISD Academics Team created a companion rubric to work alongside our Standards-Based Report Cards to support both teachers and families in providing clear and consistent expectations for what a 4, 3, 2, and 1 looks like for each reported standard on our report cards. 

Here is the link for 1st Nine Weeks Rubric for kindergarten: 

   GCISD Kindergarten SBRC Rubric - 1st NW

You can use this document as you review your child's 1st nine weeks report card that can be found in Skyward. Please reach out to your child's homeroom teacher with any questions. 

Here is the link for the 2nd Nine Weeks Rubric to see what we will be doing the next nine weeks:

GCISD Kindergarten SBRC Rubric - 2nd NW

LETTER ID and SOUNDS

Your child should be able to confidently identify (within 3 seconds, in random order)

at least 20 upper case letters, at least 20 lower case letters & at least 20 letter sounds.

AT HOME LITERACY ACTIVITIES

The link below contains some fun activities for your child to enjoy and practice different reading skills!

mCLASS® Home Connect®

https://www.mclass.amplify.com/homeconnect/

SIGHT WORDS

Below are the kindergarten sight words for the entire year. We may not cover them all and we may add in some of our own.  Knowing our sight words will help your child tremendously in reading and writing. Each week we will learn two or three new words. Please review these words with your child. Students are expected to read, write and spell these words.

These are the sight words we learned this week:

can  it

These are the sight words we have previously learned:

can  it  at  go  am  to   by   my   I    see   a    the   

READING and WRITING SKILLS WE WILL LEARN in KINDERGARTEN

By the end of Kindergarten, students should be able to:

• Recognize and produce rhyming words

• Segment words in an oral sentence

• Segment words into syllables

• Segment and pronounce initial, medial and final phonemes in spoken CVC words

• Manipulate phonemes with additions or substitutions in one-syllable words

• Name all letters of the alphabet

• Write all manuscript letters in lowercase and uppercase

• Sequence letters of the alphabet

• Fluently produce sounds of consonants and short vowels when given the letter

• Fluently produce sounds for basic digraphs (wh, sh, ch, th, ck)

• Name and write corresponding letter(s) when given sounds for consonants, consonant digraphs, and short vowels

• Distinguish long and short vowel sounds within words

• Read and spell approximately 200 CVC words 

• Spell other words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships

• Read and write our sight words

• Identify and name correct punctuation at end of sentence

• Capitalize words at beginning of sentences and names of people

• Name the author and illustrator of a story and define their roles

• Explain narrative story structure including character, setting and main events

• Use a combination of drawing and dictating to narrate linked events to tell about a story in  sequence

• Re-tell key details of narrative and informational text, using pictures or prompts as a guide

• Identify characters, settings and main events in a story, with pictures or other prompts

• Describe what happened in a story when given a specific illustration

• With prompts, compare and contrast the experiences of characters in two stories

• Explain difference between narrative and informational text

• Echo-read a passage with correct phrasing and expression

• Identify and explain new meanings for familiar words and newly taught words

• Produce and expand complete sentences in shared language activities

Curriculum Objectives

Language Arts: 

I can identify upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make. 

I can identify words that rhyme and produce a word that ryhmes with a given word.  

I can count the number of syllables in words. 

I can identify the beginning sounds of words and identify what letter makes that sound.  

I can write my name with only the first letter capitalized, followed by all the other letters lower case.

Math: 

I can compose and decompose numbers up to 10.

Social Studies: 

I can recognize that there are good citizens that make up our country.

I can identify the contributions of historical figures that helped shape the state of Texas.

I can identify the contributions of Jose Antonio Navarro that helped shape the state of Texas.

I can identify the contributions of Stephen F. Austin that helped shape the state of Texas.

I can be a good citizen and follow the Gator Way.