School forms

School forms are now available online in Skyward. Please note that printed forms will not be distributed this year. All families will need to complete the forms online. The Family and Community Engagement Department has created Youtube videos to help families with login, password assistance, and language settings. Skyward help is available.

For technical assistance, families may email family access help and the GISD Family and Community Engagement Department.

• Face to Face students have a chrome book and charger to use it during the instructional day.
• Parents will remain in their vehicles at all times. Parents will not be allowed to come inside the building.
• Lunch: There will be no outside food deliveries allowed. Students should bring their lunch to school with them each day in the morning or plan to eat their meal from the school cafeteria.
• The school will open at 7:30am. If the student develops a fever during school hours, our nurse will call you to pick him/her up within 30 minutes.
• K-2nd-grade students who arrive before 7:50 will sit quietly in the cafeteria and wait for their classroom teachers.
• 3rd-5th grade students who arrive before 7:50 will wait for their classroom teachers in the gym. 
• Face Masks: Please help your child to practice wearing his/her mask for a long period of time. While in school, students must wear masks at all times except at lunch and during recess. Facemasks should not have any logo or advertisement, and should only have school appropriate designs.
• Recess: Students will have structured recess time as they will not be allowed to use the playground due to sanitation concerns. Students will not be allowed to play any contact games that require touching a ball such as soccer, football, basketball.
• Dismissal: Our dismissal will be staggered to avoid large crowds. Kinder will dismiss at 3:20 p.m., daycare riders at 3:25 p.m., walkers & car riders at 3:30 p.m.
• All students will dismiss from inside the building so please be patient and wait in your car. Don't forget to display the pick up card in your windshield by the driver side. For more information about our procedures please refer to our back to school letter that was mailed this week to your homes: Back to school letter English & Back to school letter Spanish, standardized dress code.

Our school is not the same without students; we are doing everything we can to welcome face to face students while maintaining a safe environment for all. We are missing you and can't wait to see you on Tuesday, September 8.

 

Ready Hub

Ready Hub provides a centralized place for staff and students to access digital resources with a single sign-on experience. The Ready Hub username and password are the same credentials used for logging into a GISD computer.

Most applications will not require a second login. Simply clicking the Ready Hub icons will automatically log users into the program. Icons marked with an asterisk will require a separate login.

For security reasons, applications such as Skyward and Google apps that contain personal documents or student information will present their normal login screens.

Is your student college ready?

For the best chance of making your visions of success a reality, preparing for your student's future has to start much earlier than graduation. GISD believes that "college and career readiness" begins in elementary school and encompasses a strong academic foundation. Additionally, GISD has identified some key steps students should take to get ready setting the stage for future success!!!

AVID in action

Summarizing is an important critical reading skill because it gives students the opportunity to understand what a reading selection is mostly about. This skill involves higher level thinking because students must be able to read and synthesize information into just a few thoughts. So how do you

teach summarizing? First of all, explain that when we read to get the gist or main idea, we want to find the most important information and synthesize that information into our own words. When deciding how to summarize, we must first decide what kind of reading we are doing, either fiction or non-fiction. Show students examples that summarize a variety of textual structures and use both think-aloud and demonstration to teach this skill. Demonstrate doing a summary of a written passage by taking out material that is not important (this can be crossed out). Focus in on information or words that are repeated and then list main ideas. Look at remaining ideas and replace with a larger idea using paraphrasing. Finally, create a sentence or two of your own that summarizes the text.

In the primary grades, introduce the skill of summarizing with retelling, focusing first on the main ideas and the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Help the readers’ ability to summarize develop over time by teaching them how to synthesize the important details into a concise verbal or written product that highlights the writer’s purpose and the sequential unfolding of ideas or points. You may want to choose a familiar story or text, such as a fairy tale. Start by modeling a retelling that shows a sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end of the story. Stop at key points during a read-aloud and have students turn to a partner and talk about how the story begins, what happens in the middle, or how the story ends. Ask them to draw the parts of the story and post pictures on charts labeled Beginning, Middle, and End.

To increase rigor, consider demonstrating techniques for various genres with more specific techniques. Have students determine the main idea of a non-fiction text by utilizing inquiry and inference from the title, subheadings, and other text features.

Summarizing the text is a great strategy to incorporate into the Marking the Text and Writing in the Margins strategies. When students become proficient at summarizing, it will become natural for them to mark the text by underlining key concepts and writing their summary in the margins.

 

 

Online resources

Skyward is our student information system.  Use Skyward Family Access to find student grades, attendance and more.

 

DimensionU consists of four engaging and interactive multiplayer video games that focus on core skills in math and literacy. Each game is designed with unique features that bring out distinct academic and strategic skills in students.

Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom.

Our middle and high school students collaborate with parents, teachers and school counselors to create a personalized college & career plan with Naviance.