Ms. Elson is a great teacher. She is very interested in science. She does a lot of work with the school garden. recycling, and compost. She is very creative. She has a husband that works at the Maritime Museum. He is very helpful with a lot of ecology projects that we do around the school.
    This year, we have only one fifth grade. We are obviously the best fifth grade ever! It is nice having all of our friends in the same class, but sometimes it is too noisy and messy!
   Our room has five tables and one desk in it. Four people sit at one table, but at one table, there is a group of five with the desk near the table. We have a blue island. There are five computers in our room. Ms. Elson has a small netbook that she can hook up to the projector in our room. She uses the netbook to show us sites on line.
    We do a lot of experiments in our science class. We took a cup of water and put a raw egg in it. We added salt to the water until the egg began to float. We saw how many drops of water can fit on a penny. We could put less drops of water on the side with Lincoln on a penny.
    We are getting class pets, a bin of worms! They are red wiggler worms.
    We often go outside to the school habitat. We have solo spots. We write essays, draw pictures and make maps of our spot.
    This year, we had a lot of field trips. We went on canoe trips to study water ecology. We studied the ecosystem at Little Otter. We also went to the Maritime Museum. We went on a whale watch. We saw water porpoises, sunfish and two harbor seals. We did not see any whales because it was so foggy. The captain of the Granite State boat gave us all a ticket to come back sometime because we didn't find any whales. So far, all of our field trips are with the sixth grade. On the whale watch, we took a microscope and looked at the salt water and could see the zooplankton and phytoplankton in the water. We went on a field trip to the Chittenden Solid Waste District to see how the recycling was handled.
    We have second grade buddies from Ms. Hibbard's room that we take to the nature center and do experiments with them. We helped the second grade with the Square of Life project that they do. We will help them with their apple experiments.
   We go to Mr. Stapleford's class for math. Mr. Stapleford is a pretty fun teacher when the class is behaving. He can make math easy for us to understand.
    Ms. Douglas is our social studies teacher. We learn about history and current events. We might debate why we should or shouldn't do something as a government. We had a good debate about the postal service.
   Fifth grade is responsible for collecting all of the recycling. Students all have an assigned room to collect from. We put all the recycling into a large bin.
    Every Thursday, we have to collect the compost from outside and bring it to the compost shed. Then we have to shovel it from the bin into the big compost shed. We add manure from the honey wagon into the big compost shed. We put shredded paper on the compost as well.
    We have P.E. twice a week. Right now, we are doing a soccer unit. We also will have units on roller blading, football, basketball and frisbee. We have a low and a high ropes course at our school that we use for our physical education program.
    In art class, we are working on making our own stamps. We will be making recipe cards that have the stamps on them. We  draw portraits of ourselves and other buildings. We made clay whales.
    In Spanish, we are learning how to say the names of our vegetables and our fruits in Spanish. We know how to count in Spanish, know our colors, and furniture and clothing in Spanish.
    In technology, we work on our keyboarding. We play math games, type our papers using Open Office, and we draw using Kid Pix. We also do our research in this class. We are making trading cards of our explorers that we are studying in Social Studies.
    Library class meets once a week. We hear stories and check out books.
    In Music, we learn new dances from foreign countries. We have a movement of the month. We play games about the sound dynamics of music.
    Once a month, we have Four Winds. We learn about insects, birds, and animals in our area.
    The fifth grade is very different than all the other grades at school. Every fifth grader is in this class. We are expected to be  personally responsible for getting our work done, being polite, and cheerful.

Other good sites
Fifth Grade Vocabulary Games

Miss Maggie's Earth Adventures