Wellton Elementary www.welltonelementary.org
928-785-3311
1/6 School Starts
1/10 Grading period ends
1/17 Report Cards go home
1/20 Civil Rights Day-
No School
1/22 Game Day
1/24 Awards
Ceremonies
Have you noticed students wearing necklaces with colorful little feet attached? Each time a student walks five miles, he or she earns a shoe token which makes a great looking necklace.
Students at Wellton Elementary
School have logged over 2000 walking miles this semester. Our
Turkey Trot was a great success with every school staff member pitching in to help make it so.
Thank you parents, school staff members, and volunteer community members who helped make our Turkey Trot a safe and enjoyable event. We have also had the Jingle Dash to celebrate our fun walking habits and the coming of our
Christmas Break. If you see a child with a Green Christmas
Tree Token on their necklace, please congratulate them on their participation in our Jingle
Dash. Keep your ears open for future events for Valentine’s
Day, and St Patrick’s Day.
Author, David Greenberg, will be presenting at our school on Feb.
7, 2014. Our Young Author winners are invited to have lunch with him on that day and spend time discussing writing, how he got started, your books and writing experiences. This is a great opportunity for our students.
So students get those writing ideas down and submit them by Jan. 24th!
David Greenburg’s biography is included in this newsletter.

ATTENTION ALL SPELLERS!
The Wellton Elementary School
Spelling Bee and the 2014 Yuma
County Spelling Bee will be here before we know it! “Bee” on the lookout for more information about both events. The winner of the school spelling bee will go to the Yuma County Spelling Bee.
Keep building your vocabularies and keep your spelling skills sharp!
Players and coaches in the softball and boy’s basketball season represented us well this year. All coaching positions are strictly voluntary so thank you very much coaches and volunteer parents who gave so much time to our athletes.
The next season of sports brings us baseball for boys and basketball for girls. The team positions will first be offered to 7th and 8th grade students. There is a possibility that 6th and 5th grade students may be invited to join the teams depending on the number of positions available on the teams. Students will be notified after the first practice.
This year seems to be zooming by. Our students have finished their second Dibels testing and are ready for the upcoming 2014 New Year! our participation in the 1 st celebration of the
Turkey Trot! Which a few of our students ran the
It is amazing how far we have come but yet how far we need to go to be ready for 2 nd grade.
Students have studied a variety of materials in reading, writing and math. They have learned about spiders, bats and the beginning of our country with the pilgrims and Native Americans.
We’ve studied the growth of pumpkins and were entertained by our Antelope FFA in a field trip to the pumpkin patch. Also received a turkey for whole track and still had energy to burn.
Wow! What a year so far and a lot more to come. We hope your Holidays are fun, relaxing and restful because the second half of our school year will be as busy as the first. Come back prepared to learn more about our beautiful U.S.A.
We will learn about The Presidents who formed our country. Also, planting and many other surprise projects.

Earth science is our subject matter at this time for the 7 th graders. Here are some of the questions we are becoming familiar with. What are lithospheric plates? How does the evidence show that lithospheric plate movement occur?
8th grade students are exploring matter. Here are a few of the essential questions they will be learning to answer.
1. What is a pure substance? Why are elements and compounds considered pure substances?
2. What is a mixture? How can mixtures be created?
3. What is a compound?
How are compounds different than elements?
After the Christmas break, 7th and
8th grade students will begin the process of selecting a science experiment to conduct individually or with a partner. These projects will be completed for a grade, displayed on a science board and be put through a judging process.
Some of the projects will be submitted into the Yuma County
Science Expo in May.
Student Council sponsored a window decorating contest this year. Students were to create a
Christmas window display. There were 3 categories of windows: educational, traditional, and recycled materials. The windows were judged after school on December 16 th winning classrooms are: educational- 2 nd grade traditional- Kindergarten
. The recycled materials- Mrs. Byrd- 3 rd grade
A BIG THANK YOU TO TIER
DROP RV RESORT
RESIDENTS!!!
With the help of BaileyBooks.com, they held a book fair and donated the proceeds and many books to our School Library!! If you know any Tier Drop RV residents, make sure and thank them for their generosity and kindness!!

Wellton Elementary
PO Box 517
Wellton, AZ 85256
Phone:
(928) 785-3311
We’re on the Web! www.welltonelementary.org
I was born in Brooklyn, New York on
October 13, 1954. My mother’s name is
Sema; my father’s Jack. I spent the early years of my life in the city, overlooking a river and shipyard, and when I was about
4 or 5 years old moved out to the suburbs,
Great Neck, Long Island. I grew up there in a ridiculously large house with a giant backyard, perfect for childhood games and mischief and chasing our dog, and being chased in return.
My parents were definitely major influences. My mom was a lover of language, always reading reading reading, writing writing writing. I can still remember her reading me the OZ stories when I was quite little. A bit older, she read me Rudyard Kipling’s JUST SO
STORIES. My Dad was a civil rights lawyer
(he is now a law school professor) and wrote books on the side, very dry stuff.
Where my Mom was very effusive and poetic with words, he was very precise and technical (he still constantly corrects my grammar). But I still vividly remember him reading me Carl
Sandburg’s ROOTABAGA STORIES, and the fabulous ARCHY AND MEHITABEL poems by
Don Marquis. He also read me, I’ll never forget, Gunga Din, Fuzzy Wuzzy, and
Danny Deever, fabulous poems by Rudyard
Kipling.
I loved to read as a kid. And there’s no question in my mind that my love of reading helped me a great deal to become a writer. Reading familiarizes you with words, so you can therefore write with greater dexterity, coherency, and vocabulary. I also developed, as a teenager, a love for the wilderness, and started my lifelong love for canoeing and wilderness backpacking.
At age 17 I went away to Reed
College in Portland, Oregon. I was attracted to Reed merely by the fact that it was in Oregon, which sounded very “wildernessy” to me. I studied Philosophy of Religion there, and, my sophomore year, started keeping a journal. This was when I started writing in a serious way, caring about the craft of writing. I graduated from college, and, after several odd jobs, started my own
Chinese eggroll restaurant at a weekend craft fair. During the week, when I wasn’t eggrolling, I began volunteering at local schools, helping kids with their reading and writing. I started using the poems
I’d been writing in my journal as teaching material for these kids, and found, to my astonishment, that they really seemed to enjoy my writing. This gave me the incentive to write more and more. Eventually
I started mailing my poems into publishers, and, after countless rejections, eventually published my first book of poetry when I was 28,
SLUGS (Little, Brown & Co.). Since then I’ve published THE GREAT
SCHOOL LUNCH REBELLION, YOUR
DOG MIGHT BE A WEREWOLF - YOUR
TOES COULD ALL EXPLODE, BUGS!,
SKUNKS!, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
HUMPTY DUMPTY?, SNAKES!, and
THE BOOK OF BOYS FOR GIRLS – THE
BOOK OF GIRLS FOR BOYS, DON’T
FORGET YOUR ETIQUETTE, CROCS!, and A TUGGING STRING (my first novel).
I have a wonderful son, Sam, born in
1989.
I now live in Portland, Oregon. My hobbies are reading, swimming, cooking, cooking, cooking, ping pong, boogy boarding, and, mainly trying to lead a good, productive, satisfying life.