Ms. Elson is a kind person. She always has a smile. Ms. Elson loves science and wants students to love it too and to learn more about it. She teaches science to all the fifth and sixth graders. Because we are in her homeroom, we also do our reading and spelling in our classroom.
    For reading, we have literature circles. We have to do a job two or three times a week with a group about a book. You might have to be a  passage picker.  The passage picker would pick an interesting part of the book and would read that to their group. If your job was being a connector, you would have to find a connection to your life to the characters in the book. One job is being a discussion director. The director has to write down 4 questions about the story and give them to the students in the class. The director also assigns the other jobs. The last job is illustrator. The illustrator has to draw a picture about the reading in the book for that week. There are three different groups in our classroom.  Right now, one group is reading Firebug Connection, one group is reading Trouble at Marsh Harbor and the last group is reading The Missing Manatee.
   Ms. Elson likes to go to the habitat. When we go to the habitat, we find a solo spot. We do some of our work there in a quiet place. We have to write down what we observe or maybe draw a picture of that spot.  Sometimes, we go out to the habitat with our second grade buddies and then we work with the second graders.  When we go with the second graders, we look for certain things with them.
    There is a creek, Little Otter, right by our school. We walked on the trail to get there. We collected bugs and water critters. We had stations that had different activities, like writing in journals or water testing for phosphates, nitrates, and dissolved oxygen (DO). We also had to take the temperature of the water. We brought back water bugs to school  to look at under the microscope.
    We have a school garden. We have picked leeks, tomatoes, black beans and pumpkins. The cafeteria uses the vegetables in our school meals. We love the black beans in burritos and in the bean and corn salad. We are planning on making pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread  and pumpkin whoopie pies with the pumpkins. We will also eat the pumpkin seeds roasted.
       We are responsible for recycling in fifth grade. Every student has a different room to pick up the recycling bins. They have to make sure that there are no bottle caps on the bottles. We also have to check that there isn't any non-recyclable stuff. We recycle every Wednesday.
    Our school composts the leftover food and paper at lunchtime. We weigh how much we compost. It goes into a composting field somewhere in Ferrisburgh. We are going to be getting worms to help with composting. We will use it in our classroom to take care of the food that is leftover from our snacks.
    We have five specials in the week. We have Physical Education twice a week. It is fun, we get to play games. We also do testing with the Pacer. The Pacer is a sound file that she plays on her ipod. The file has a woman's voice that says "The test will begin. On the five second countdown, you will start on the word Start! Five - Four - Three - Two - One. Start! " We have to run to the other side of the gym. Everytime the beep goes, we run to the other side.  On Tuesdays we have library. We have discussions about DCF books. We sometimes have interesting discussions about things in general. We have music on Thursdays. We sing songs together. We have art class on Thursday. We are making stamp pads with our animals on them. Sometimes we paint portraits and we made paper mache sculptures.  We have technology once a week on Fridays. We work on typing correctly. We will learn how to do spreadsheets, word processing and powerpoints. We also use technology to make art. We have Spanish for half a year as well. In Spanish class, we learn about other countries that speak Spanish. We even made bread for the school to celebrate El Dia de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead.
    We have had a lot of field trips this year. We went to Little Otter Creek, the wetlands, canoeing and even a whale watch. We also went to a museum in Crown Point. We went to Basin Harbor and went out on a boat called The Escape. We went to New York and saw an underwater shipwreck. They had a little machine with a camera on it and it had a TV attached to it. The camera went down in the water and we watched to see the boat. Only half of the boat is left. It was very interesting. We learned that there are a lot of boats that are sunk in Lake Champlain. There are Revolutionary war ships that were sunk there. We went to the Maritime Museum to learn more about that. We also went on a whale watch in Rye, New Hampshire. We saw two kinds of whales, the finback and the right whale. We were in the Atlantic Ocean when we saw the whales.
    In conclusion, this fifth grade is a lot of hard work. It is also a lot of fun. We are looking forward to  learning a lot and hoping that we get to do a lot more field trips!

    by Anne and Joshua