Mrs. Downing is our 5th grade teacher and she loves writing. She has brown, curly hair and her face is almost always red with excitement. Mrs. Downing is our homeroom teacher and our writing teacher. She also loves reading our writing. She gives us courage to write difficult pieces. Also Mrs. Downing makes writing more fun because she finds fun ideas like when we are doing our book reports she printed a piece of paper that shows a less boring book report! Some kids had her in 3rd grade and now have her in 5th grade. Also we are doing poems for writing class. Mrs. Downing also let us have a free write journal that we got to decorate with pictures and magazine photos. We write in them and we only get 7 minutes each time. Mrs. Downing loves details to writing. She doesn't like words that are common like good, big, small and any other words that are not descriptive. Words like mammoth, puny, awesome and other words  that are descriptive are words that she likes.
    There are 4 tables in our classroom. There are 4 chairs at each table. There are also 3 desks, but no one uses them.We have a projector in the classroom. There are 14 kids in our class. There are 7 girls and 7 boys in our class. We go to a different classroom for each subject. Mrs. Downing does writing, Mr. Stapleford does math, Ms. Douglas does social studies, and Ms. Elson does science. We go to different classes each day. Mr. Stapleford is the best math teacher. We love math because when we do Mad Minutes Mr. Stapleford shouts "STOP!!" and we get frightened each time.  He encourages us to say something when we don't understand what he saying. When we don't pay attention he yells our name and we pay attention.  Mr. Stapleford teases us in a nice way by making up nicknames for some of us.
           Ms. Douglas is having us do research on an explorer from back in the olden days. Some of the explorers are Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson, Francisco  Pizzaro, Francisco Coronando and other explorers. She is also a great teacher because she lets us go on the computer in the lab or in her classroom. We went on a field trip to Lake Champlain and saw a sunken ship.
       Ms. Elson is the best teacher because she does science and she takes us on field trips. We get to use microscopes. She gives us  great things that stick in our brain like one day we did Jeopardy and we still remember it. She is very fun because we are doing a water subject and we do things like play games, do worksheets and usually a field trip. Afterwards we use the microscope to see blood cells and leaves.  If we are doing a spider unit, we might also use the microscope. She also helps us with composting at lunch.
       We did a lot of field trips, but our favorite field trip is the whale watch. We saw two types of whales. They are the right whale and the fin whale. The fin whale is the second largest mammal in the world. The right whale is also an endangered whale. We saw a right whale mother with its calf. They were lobtailing together and blowing mist and breaching. We saw a fin whale blow mist out of its blowhole. A couple of us saw dolphins. The boat is called Granite State.  The boat ride was very wavy and rocked us back and forth. Also it was cold out on the ocean. We were out for hours. The temperature was very, very cold.
    Fifth grade is the best year with more changes than any other year at our school. We have different teachers for different subjects. We also have had more field trips. We are glad we live in Ferrisbugh because we get to change classrooms and have many great teachers.

By Sofia, Brynn, and Emily