Week Of October 21st

It's hard to believe next week will be the end of October!  The year is certainly moving along!  The students are very excited for Halloween next week.  Students will have an opportunity to change into their costume at lunch.  Please send it with them to school that morning.  We will have our school parade at 12:30 p.m.  Let's hope for good weather!  Following the parade our 4/5 team will come upstairs for our party.  The students may bring a board game to play and we will enjoy the food from our parents that signed up at conferences.  We might even have a special visitor, Mrs. Roskos!  It should be a lot of fun.


Please remember to turn in the permission slips for Camp Edwards and the 4th grade special activities next week.

Here is a message from our PTO: 

Way to go, Whittier team! We are very close to reaching the $12,000 goal – as of Weds 10/24, we are 88% of the way there. There are a few days remaining in this campaign but we won’t ever turn away a check! If you’ve been contemplating end of year charitable donations, now is the time to pull the trigger!

PTO funds support things like afterschool homework help, ACES, author visits, classroom supply grants, field trip buses, scholarships to Camp Edwards (an outdoor education experience for 5^th graders) and WISE (our fantastic afterschool enrichment program comprised of a range of classes), all-school picnics and many other events. Visit www.whittierpto.org for more info.

Please help! Your contributions ensure that these programs continue. Surpassing the $12,000 goal will provide funds to install benches and trees at the playground in the spring. Donations are tax deductible – Whittier PTO is a 501(c)3 organization run by 100% volunteers.

Pledging continues until November – online – cash – check – Paypal – credit card. Visit www.dibbee.com/cause/whittier-wildcat-fun-run

Have a wonderful week-end!

Leslie Weiss


Reading: In reading this week we have continued our work on theme and moved on to the use of words in a story.  We have looked at important words and how they help us to understand a poem and/or story.  Today we looked at verbs in a story and how interesting verbs make a difference in a story/poem.  Hopefully the students will add interesting verbs to their stories!

Writing:  Our creative minds went to paper this week!  We continued working on our expository prompts and tried to sort out our ideas.  We learned to list our ideas and squint to put them together.  The colors we circled in our list then helped us write our papers.  Next week we will begin writing our final expository paper.

4th Grade Math:  We have been doing a lot of adding and subtracting in class with story problems.  The story problems have been keeping us busy.  There were many different multi-step story problems.  Next week we will review our unit and then have a math test on Wednesday.

Science:  In science we continued our Magnetism unit and moved on to Electricity.  We had our quiz and they were sent home today.  We started Electricity by having an experiment with two wires, a D battery, and a small lightbulb.  The students eventually lite their lightbulb.  There was a lot of excitement!

5th Grade Math: Check out Mrs. Maddsen's website and newsletter for updates: http://www.op97.org/swennerberg/

Social Studies: Check out Mrs. Maddsen's website and newsletter for updates: http://www.op97.org/swennerberg/

Miscellaneous: A huge thank you goes out to our fantastic Whittier PTO for the generous classroom donation!  We put the money to good use on a variety of items this year: math curriculum supplements for Common Core, reading notebooks for every student in the class, a much-needed pencil sharpener, and a few new books!  We're grateful for the continued support and hard work by our PTO.