OUR GRAY HAWK FAMILY works together to help students feel safe, loved, and inspired so they can be empowered learners and engaged citizens.

Big shout out to Dylan Pierce (5th Williamson) for being the alternate as well. Way to go, Gray Hawks!

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU

We just wanted to send a shout out to everyone for helping make our first GHES book fair such a great success. We were able to take many books from the fair for our collection, as well as earning over $1,000.00 to purchase new books!! That is so awesome! The students had a great time and so did we! We hope that you stay warm and healthy over the coming days!

Cassandra Quinby and Cyndi Kenton

GHES Library

Remember if you ever have any questions or concerns about library please reach out!

Cyndi Kenton Elementary Library USD458

ckenton@usd458.org

To continue on our month of February we will turn our focus to one very celebrated African American who had an overwhelming impact on people and our country. We’ll take a look at children’s books about the great Jackie Robinson. We will showcase a variety of fiction and non-fiction books that give great overviews of what his life was like.

As a part of our commitment to ensuring that our students are exposed to the contributions of people of color and from different backgrounds, we kicked off this past week by giving daily clues to a famous person from history that has made our world a better place. This past week, the students heard the following clues:

• She was crowned Miss Black Tennessee in 1972 and started her own production company. She had her own tv show that aired for 25 years.

• This person is a talented actress nominated for an Academy Award in her first movie and she is also television’s highest-paid entertainer.She is also a committed philanthropist (a philanthropist is someone who seeks to promote the welfare of others, especially by the donating generously to good causes. She provides significant assistance to Morehouse College, Tennessee State University, and the Chicago Academy of Arts, as well as to the Chicago Public Schools. She also funds battered women’s shelters and campaigns to catch child abusers.

• She was named after the biblical character on her birth certificate, but people mispronounced it regularly and the nickname stuck. She was so poor growing up that, as a child, she was teased at school for wearing dresses made of potato sacks.

• At age 19, she was anchoring the news at Nashville’s WTVF-TV, making her the youngest person and the first African American to hold the position. She donated her voice for several cartoon characters, including Gussie the goose in Charlotte’s Web, and Eudora, the mother of Princess Tiana in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog.

Our brains and bodies are constantly developing and what we absolutely know is that adversity and trauma impact our nervous system. When OUR kids are facing adversity their bodies respond in many different ways. The video today features Dr. Lori and talks a bit more about the ANS (autonomic nervous system) and the role that it plays throughout EVERY ASPECT of OUR lives.

Dr. Lori discusses the sympathetic and the parasympathetic pathways in our nervous system and the role they play in the fight/flight response (sympathetic pathway) or returning us to a state of calm (parasympathetic pathway). Check it out.

Next week we will have some strategies to stimulate the vagus nerve (also called the 10th cranial nerve) and help us when we are struggling with regulation.