GUFS Weekly Newsletter
December 13, 2021
Principal's Message
Dear GUFS Community,
I want to share how proud I am of all students who worked diligently to close out the first marking period strong. Since the start of the school year, we have witnessed students blossom in their academic, communication and problem-solving skills. Not only do we see growth in their academic performance, we also see students displaying curiosity, compassion and empathy for each other. These dispositions are equally as important as the academic skills. These particular qualities are to be celebrated and valued just the same. There is no standardized test that measures showing love and kindness in the world. We applaud every single student this marking period who did their best socially and academically. Bravo to all!
Please enjoy this week's Newsletter which emphasizes the incredible work that our teachers and staff do each day with students. The bar will continue to be set high and we know our children will rise!
Sincerely,
Allison Emig
Calendar Reminders
For a detailed look at what's happening, visit the School Building Calendar for the 2021-2022 school year
- UPCOMING DATES:
- December 15th: 8th Grade Trip to James O'Neill High School 8:30am
- December 24th-December 31st: Winter Holiday Recess (School Closed)
Lost & Found Gallery
Take a peek at our Lost & Found Gallery (updated weekly) to see if any items belong to your child! Many of these items may have already made their way home to you. If you are still missing one of these items, please contact the main office to let us know! slusardi@gufs.org or cmariani@gufs.org
Yale RULER in Action
Students across grade levels have been participating in the Yale RULER lessons during guidance time or the SEL elective in the middle school. We are working on developing a deep understanding of emotion vocabulary terms, and how to place them on our Mood Meter. The Mood Meter classifies emotions into 4 color quadrants (yellow, red, blue, and green) based on the pleasantness and energy level of the feeling. Most classes K-3 have finished their studies of their first 4 emotion words (one from each quadrant). We are connecting emotions to wonderful children’s literature and to real world events. Some examples of our studies include Pablo Picasso’s blue period (Down), Mia Hamm/US women's soccer (Competitive), the story of Emmanual Ofuso Yeboah (Rejected), and the Thai soccer team that was rescued from a cave (Grateful). In lower elementary, we are learning about the concept of our “Best Self” - which is the version of ourselves that is inspiring and compassionate to others, and makes others feel good. We are learning how to recognize a character’s “best self” in a story, and how to pause and summon our “best self” when we become overwhelmed or need to make a hard decision.
In our Middle School social emotional learning elective, students are learning about the Mood
Meter. The Mood Meter is a tool that helps build awareness of emotions in ourselves and
others. It helps us understand how our emotions influence our thinking and behavior, empowers us to recognize and label our full range of emotions, and use our emotions wisely. We played a Bingo game around feeling words and for each feeling word, their groups had to list a song that matched!
In 5th grade Guidance, we started the conversation to build our class Charter. Our charter is an expression of our values and norms unique to the class, intended to make all feel safe,
welcome, and heard. We started with reading an excerpt from the book "Each Kindness" and then had a discussion around the question ‘How do we want to feel at school?’. We generated feeling words as a group.
In 4th grade Guidance, we are learning about different feeling words on the Mood Meter. Our
most recent word we learned about was motivated. We are working on creating comic book
strips to tell a story about feeling motivated!
8th Grade Students Visit Haldane High School
Kindergarten
5th Graders Educate Peers About the Pumpkin Project
Nurse Melissa's Corner
A Reminder from Nurse Melissa and the Department of Health
Any student or staff out of school with a symptom of COVID (fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, fatigue, diarrhea or vomiting, runny nose or muscle aches) will need a COVID test prior to their return to school. Contact Nurse Melissa if you need help finding testing.
COVID-19 Vaccination Status
If your child has received the COVID 19 vaccination, please let Nurse Melissa know. Once they are "fully vaccinated" they will be exempt from quarantine if they remain symptom free.
COVID-19 Testing
Hello Garrison Community,
We continue to keep our eye on ways to keep our school safe and open. There is one mitigation tool we feel is under-utilized and that is our testing. Testing is a tool used to identify people who may be contagious even without knowing they are. It is a way to keep our school a safe environment. We would like to expand our testing program to include more students. To this end, we will expand our testing availability into the school day, with help from the Putnam County Department of Health. If you would like to sign your child(ren) up, please complete the attached consent form. With an increased pool of students to test, we expect to test individual students on a rotating basis, so each student would be tested appropriately once a month. The tests we use are BINAXNow which are rapid antigen tests and results are shown in 15 minutes. A nurse would communicate the results to you.
Please consider completing the consent form to sign your student up for testing. If you have any questions please contact Melissa DeFonce, mdefonce@gufs.org or 845-424-3689 x226.
Thank you for your support,
Melissa DeFonce, RN
Community Organizations & Resources on The GUFS District Website
Stay connected to our community and see what's happening locally by visiting the Community Organizations & Resources page of the GUFS District Website
Philipstown Recreation
PTA Corner
GCEF Corner
Dear Friends of GCEF,
As we check the post office for the final few "snail mail" contributions, we are immensely grateful for your dedicated participation in making Fall Appeal a record-breaking success!
Together, the Garrison community gave over $23,000 in annual donations, to provide academic and extracurricular enrichment to our children, teachers and school staff. We are especially grateful to the many people who gave for the first time ever, yielding an impressive number of participating donor families. Your contributions, at all levels, are truly appreciated.
Coat Drive
We are GUFS!
Email: slusardi@gufs.org
Website: https://www.gufs.org/Domain/4
Location: 1100 NY-9D, Garrison, NY 10524
Phone: 845-424-3689
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/garrisonufs/