January Newsletter
Gateway Elementary
From the Principal
Greetings Great Gateway Families!!
Welcome to 2022! Each year brings new challenges, new successes, and new milestones, and I embrace them all with excitement and gratitude. Each experience gives us something—knowledge, grace, joy, strength, or character. My hope for us all is that we grow in wonderful ways through our experiences this year.
As you may know, on the first day of school, I always speak with the students about my expectations. I talk to them about how I believe that everyone is capable of doing something wonderful and that the “something wonderful” doesn’t have to be a huge project. It could be something simple that is done during the course of a school day. This year we have adopted the Leader in Me program. Through this program and its core pillars—everyone is a leader and everyone has a genius—we are continuing to focus on growing as individuals and as a school family. On Monday, students will watch a video produced by our Student Council that gives student perspectives on leadership and finding your genius. In their morning meetings and guidance lessons, students will continue their learning on the 7 Habits of Success. In so many ways, we are continuing to capitalize on the “wonderfulness” of all our students!
I love January because we begin to see so many lightbulbs turn on! Yesterday, as a staff, we explored our middle of the year data and compared it to our beginning of the year data. You should see our growth! If you are interested in more information on our academic data, please plan to attend our SAC (School Accountability Meeting) on January 18th at 5:15pm. You should also attend this event if you are interested in volunteering for Retro Night as we will be planning at this time as well.
Also in January will be our 1st Gateway Elementary Showcase Night! This evening will be about showcasing all the great things we do at Gateway for our current families and any new families who are interested in learning about Gateway Elementary. We would love to have help from our family volunteers to prepare displays (artwork, collages, etc.) for this event. Our Showcase is January 25th from 5:30-7:00pm. Please email me if you are interested in helping: alawson@wpsdk12.org.
Cultural Night Coming Soon: If you have ever wanted to experience culture and food from around the world, then this event is for you! Gateway families from all over the world participate in this event by preparing cultural dishes and visuals to share. Students have “passports” and have a great time seeing how many cultures they can visit in one night. If you are interested in showcasing your families’ culture and food, please contact Kathy Eans (keans@wpsdk12.org) for more information. Cultural Night is on February 6 from 6:00pm-7:30pm.
I would also like to extend a warm welcome to our new students and families. Welcome to Gateway!! We are thrilled to have you as a part of our family. To everyone: welcome to 2022! I’m glad that we are taking this journey together. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to give me a call or shoot me an email.
Sincerely,
Principal Ashley Lawson
Lost and Found
Virtual Backpack
The Virtual Backpack is a paperless means of distributing flyers, newsletters and other notices that traditionally have come home in your child's backpack. Rather than local organizations making copies of their approved flyers, and District personnel coordinating their distribution to the schools, the flyers will instead be posted to this designated place on our website.
Please go to Virtual Backpack link for more information.
Art News
Chinese New Year begins on February 1st this year. During January, students will enjoy looking at Asian works of art, learning about what countries are in Asia, and making artwork using traditional Asian materials and techniques such as batik, block printing, and papermaking. This is a great time to have a family conversation about who your long ago relatives are, where a family member may have served in the military or gone to school, where someone did mission work, whose relatives live far away, who was adopted from an Asian country, and who in the family might have other connections to Asia.
Please send in a signed note about your child's Asian connection to be shared in art class!
From the Counselors
The Gateway counseling and mental health team hope you had an enjoyable and rejuvenating holiday break. We have missed seeing and working with your children and are ready to jump right back in with guidance classes this week! Students will review the Habits they have learned so far (Habits 1-5) and be introduced to Habit 6 this month which is Synergize.
Synergy is:
1. Celebrating differences.
2. Working together.
3. Being open-minded.
4. Finding new and better ways.
Ways to create synergy in your family:
1. Define: Clarify the problem or issue.
2. Their way: Seek first to understand the other person’s needs.
3. My way: Seek to be understood by sharing your needs and ideas.
4. Brainstorm: Create NEW options and ideas together.
5. Synergize: Find the best solution…a 3rd Alternative.
Activities to reinforce synergy at home:
Activity #1: Choose any family member and finish the following sentences keeping them in mind.
1. What I admire most about you is…
2. One of my favorite memories is…
3. I’m glad you are and I’m not...
4. One of the funniest things you have ever done is…
5. One of my proudest memories of you is…
6. I like it when you…
Share your answers with that family member. How did they respond? Did they learn something new about themselves?
Activity #2: Identify and celebrate family members' strengths.
Write two or three strengths for each family member, starting with yourself. Share these strengths with each other. Did any of the same qualities show up from different people in the same family member?
Please don’t hesitate to contact Debbie Bartley dbartley@wpsdk12.org Rachel Gray rgray@wpsdk12.org or our social worker Tory Hartsock tpetrusawich@wpsdk12.org if you have any questions or concerns. Welcome back!
Important Dates
Jan 14 - Report Cards go home
Jan 25 - Showcase 5:30-7:00 pm
Lunch Menu
New Gateway Facebook Page
WPSD - GATEWAY ELEMENTARY
https://www.facebook.com/WPSD-Gateway-Elementary-School-103778115379133