* 5 Z *

*ENGLISH*

By Caitlin, Dana, and Max

The Art of Keeping Cool
The Art of Keeping Cool was our summer reading book. It was about a boy named Robert whose dad was in World War II.  Robert was living with his sister, Mom and his dad’s side of the family in a cottage in Rhode Island. Elliot, Robert’s cousin, is a bit strange though because he always seems to keep his cool and never expresses his feelings. He just keeps them inside. That is where the title comes from.   
Elliot is really into painting, while Robert is really interested in all of the war guns going by. But while this is happening, a German painter Abel Hoffman comes into their town and is accused of being a spy, when really he is just a painter. He actually is trying to get away from the Germans because Hitler does not approve of his way of painting and so the Germans started treating him badly. Robert’s Grandpa strongly agrees with the town’s folk and thinks that Abel should be arrested. But even worse, Elliot starts sneaking out to go to where Abel lives so he can be taught some of his painting skills. But when Robert finds out what Elliot is doing he is caught between his family, the town and his cousin. While trying to help his cousin and Abel he tries to find out why there is almost nothing about his father in the house. There are no pictures of his father, and if you went into the house you would think that only his brother lived there.
During the time in school when we were talking about The Art of Keeping Cool, we studied life in the 1940’s and listened to old radio shows and made up some of our own. We also did some tableaus, which are frozen scenes from the book. It was very fun. 

The Wish Giver
Near the beginning of school we read The Wish Giver. This book was about four people who each got a white card with a red spot on it. With this card, they could make any wish they wanted. After they made their wishes, each one gets exactly what they asked for and that became a big problem.   

While reading The Wish Giver, we learned about Plot Pyramids and similes and metaphors. Plot Pyramids help you keep track of the events of a story. At the bottom of the pyramid is the introduction: you meet the characters from the book and learn a bit about them. When you start climbing the pyramid that is called Rising Action: the character’s problems are explained. When you are at the top that is called your Climax: this is the most important or exciting part of the book. Finally, when you are going down the pyramid, that is Falling Action: the problems are wrapped up, ending with a conclusion. 

Similes and metaphors are short sentences that help someone describe something like, “her hat was as green as the grass.” The only difference is a simile uses either like or as. But a metaphor does not use like or as, for example: “I had a mountain of homework last night.” Using these helps make your stories more exciting for the reader. 

After reading The Wish Giver, everyone in the class made new chapter fir the story, as if there were five people who got a card. Here were some of the main ideas from these new stories: A girl asks for a sister who her friends will adore but actually it turns out her little sister is annoying. Or a boy wishes to be a really good athlete but it turns out that the better he gets the less time he spends with his family.  

Poetry
This year we learned a lot about poetry. We studied a lot of different kinds of poems, like shape poems (a poem that is shaped like the thing it describes, maybe an apple, for example), story poems (a poem that tells a story), rhyming poems, epic poems (ones that are really long), and many others, too. Each day we read a poem of a new type by a famous poet, like Edgar Allen Poe, Langston Hughes, William Blake, Sharon Creech, E. A. Robinson, Shel Silverstein and lots more. We also wrote a lot of poems, usually by trying to write poems like the ones we studied in class. At the end of our poetry study, we collected our best poems in an anthology. Each person put in their best three poems and we illustrated them, too. A lot of us really liked studying poetry. It was a lot of fun!

Drama
In English we learn a about drama, that’s what you call a play when it is written out. We read plays, do a little acting and write our own scripts! Some of the plays we read were Aesop’s Fables (liked the tortoise and the hare and the fox and the crow), The Necklace by Maupassant, and Sitting In For Dr. King (which was about sit-in protests in North Carolina in the 1960s). We read a couple more, too. For homework we had to write own scripts and monologues, adding stage directions and writing the persons name in bold before their lines. Soon were going to write plays in class in small groups.

Writing
We write many different things in fifth grade. Sometimes we write small stories, like where would you go on your dream vacation, or imagine you find a priceless Egyptian artifact. We also wrote a lot while studying different kinds of books or literature. We wrote fables with animals while studying drama. We wrote poems of all kinds while working on poetry. After we read The Wish Giver, we wrote a “lost chapter” from this book, where we wrote a story in the same setting and style as The Wish Giver with a new character that we made up. That was really fun.

Peer Editing
Sometimes when we do writing, we do peer editing. That’s where another person in the class politely criticizes your work to help make it better. After we do a big writing project, Mr. Adams pairs us up with a classmate. We give our partners our writing piece and he/she edits it. We use peer editing when we wrote our Wish Giver stories. We even did peer editing when we wrote all this information for our website! Peer editing is useful because you get other people’s ideas.

Grammar
In English, we have to learn about Grammar. That is where you study and practice using things like capitalization, punctuation, and parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs). Sometimes Mr. Adams will give us a paragraph of writing full of mistakes. Then we will read through it and correct it. Other times we use Mad Libs with a partner, so we can practice our verbs and nouns. We even made comics just to practice using adjectives. So I guess even grammar can be fun.     

Wordly Wise
Starting in Fourth grade you get a book called Wordly Wise. This workbook teaches new vocabulary words. The book is divided into 20 lessons. In each lesson, you learn 15 new words. For every lesson, there are five different exercises. They are called things like Finding Meanings, Just the Right Word, and Word Relationships. In these exercises, you put two parts of a sentence together to make one complete sentence or you might complete analogies, answer multiple-choice questions, or read a story and answer questions about it. All of these exercises help you learn the meaning of the words in the lesson. Lastly, there are also tests you take after you complete a lesson to show what you know. I like Wordly Wise because it helps us to learn lots of new words.

Spelling
In English we don’t have spelling tests. Instead, every time we misspell a word in our homework, we have to write that in our spelling journal. We write the word the way we spelled it once and then the right way five times. Hopefully this will help us learn to spell the word we got wrong. We use our spelling journals we can focus on the words we have trouble with and not other words.

We will also be studying debates and short stories. We will update these soon!