Hi, friends! I’m very excited to continue my “School Days” series by recounting some of my memories from third, fourth, and fifth grade. I had so many memories to share here! I went to three different schools, had five different teachers (and two student teachers!), participated in some new extracurriculars, and also experienced my parents’ separation. A lot happened!
THIRD GRADE (1996 – 1997)
- One of the cutest things my school did was have a little post office. Kids from all grades could drop off letters to their friends and then the “postal workers” would deliver the letters on a random afternoon. The third graders were the postal workers and I was so excited when my time came to be a postal worker. I had so much fun sorting the mail, accepting the mail, and delivering the letters throughout the school. So. Much. Fun.
- In second grade, our school did a school-wide spelling bee. (I forgot to mention this in my first School Days post!) I ended up in 4th place out of all the second graders (the word I lost on: cousin) and my brother placed 1st out of all the third graders (a feat he never ceases to remind me of. I believe the word he won on was Zurich.) Well, throughout all of third grade, my mom made my brother and I practice our spelling words every single day. She had a whole notebook filled with spelling words, what words we needed to practice, etc. Our school did not hold a spelling bee that year. !!! Mom has never lived this down with us.
- One of my classmates lost his mother during third grade. I still remember his name and how horrified I was that his mom died. He was so young! I couldn’t imagine losing my mom so young.
- For a period of time, there was an additional music extracurricular: learning how to play the recorder. I begged and begged my parents to buy me a recorder and let me join this new extracurricular, and they finally acquiesced. I went to 2, maybe 3, lessons before abandoning the practice. Sorry, Mom and Dad! Nowadays, kids can learn songs through watching Kids youtube.
- I participated in a talent show this year with a few friends. I honestly cannot remember what our talent was. I think we did a really bad dance routine to the Spice Girls. A much better trio of dancers won the talent show.
- We moved to a new apartment this year. It had three bedrooms, so my brother and I finally didn’t have to share a room. I think of this apartment fondly! One day during the summer while my brother and I were playing together, there was a call on our landline and my brother picked it up. When he hung up, I asked him, “Who was that, Chuck, Muck, or Fuck?” I did not mean to rhyme my dad’s friend Chuck with the f-word and I was horrified with myself. My brother held this over me for yeaaaaars. We still laugh about it today, and my mom is always like, “What did you think would happen if you told us this story?!”
FOURTH GRADE (1997-1998)
- I was at a new school in fourth grade. Actually, I went back to the school I was at in kindergarten and first grade. Like previous years, I had one teacher for language arts/writing and another one for math/science. I do not remember their names, but I had language arts/writing in the morning and math/science in the afternoon.
- Every month, we had a different project to complete. I only remember some of the projects (probably because my mom did most of the work). For one project, we had to create a foam doll that resembled someone from history. I think I chose Clara Barton. For another, we had to do a whole report on one state, and I chose Ohio since that’s where my dad was from.
- I was in the school play this year! It was a play involving a pet store and I was a fish. I even had a solo in the play and I still remember the opening lines I had to sing. When I told my mom that I was cast in the play, she didn’t seem all too excited but I later learned she was worried about the cost of getting my costume together. (Understandable!) In the end, I wore an orange shirt, orange shorts, and orange tights, lol. The other fish in our cast just wore swim shorts and one of those towels that goes over your head and had shark fins on it. How do you even make a fish costume in the age before Pinterest?! (I do want to say that my mom and dad were front and center in the audience during the play, so she was very excited for me to be in the play, just worried about the expense.)
- As I mentioned, I had one teacher (and classroom) for language arts/writing and another teacher (and classroom) for math/science. These classrooms were right next to each other, separated by a heavy, movable wall. After lunch every day, the wall would be pushed back and one of the teachers would stand in the middle of the two classrooms and read a few chapters from a book. I loved this so much! I remember that we read a lot of Roald Dahl during these after-lunch read-alouds.
- I was a cheerleader this year! My mom enrolled both my brother and me in a nearby youth football/cheerleading league, and I had so much fun. But oh my god, what a time commitment! We had practice four days a week and then games on Saturdays. Our cheerleading program went to competition after the football season was over, and we placed third in both competitions, which was exciting! I remember those competitions so well because we practiced so much and then got to have a sleepover at this really, really fancy house where we ate pizza and got our hair done up in these foam rollers that we had to sleep in overnight. The house belonged to one of the cheerleaders in our program and she had a fricken balcony outside her room. I was convinced she was a princess.
- We had student teachers this year, a male teacher and a female teacher. I had the biggest crush on the male teacher (all of us girls did! A twenty-something guy teaching a bunch of 10-year-olds? Lawdy.) and I thought the female teacher was so cool. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up! I have this very distinct memory of her walking into the cafeteria one afternoon to pick us up from lunch; she was wearing sunglasses and just looked so damn cool. I imagined she spent her lunch break with friends she knew off-campus and was so very jealous. (Hindsight: She likely spent her lunch break trying to eat as fast as she could while doing a million other things.)
FIFTH GRADE (1998-1999)
- I attended a new school for fifth grade and my teacher this year, Mrs. Chapman, was my favorite teacher ever. She was so fun and personable and wise and kind. I loved her so much that when I had to do some volunteer hours at a school during college, I volunteered in her classroom.
- All of the fifth graders in my school district had to participate in an economic educational program called Enterprise Village. We spent a few weeks in the classroom learning economic concepts like balancing a checkbook, applying for jobs, learning different concepts of a business environment, etc. Then, we went to Enterprise Village where we got to “work” for one day. Enterprise Village is set up similarly to a shopping mall with tons of different businesses: McDonald’s, Time Warner, the Bucs, etc. Every kid was given a business and a job. I was given the job as bookkeeper at McDonald’s, which meant I spent much of my day crunching numbers (go figure). It was such a fun day and my mom was a chaperone, although she was helping out at a different business so I didn’t see her much!
- I was excited to be a school patrol this year. Since I was new to the school, I didn’t know if I was going to get to be a patrol (something I had wanted for years) as patrols are usually selected at the end of fourth grade but I was added to the team a few weeks into the year. It was so exciting! I loved being able to get out of class a little early and basically just hang out with my friends.
- My parents officially separated this year. My mom, my brother, and I moved in with my grandparents. It was a tight fit as my uncle and his twin daughters (who were 3 at the time) were also living with them. My mom and brother had beds in the sunroom/office while we squeezed my bed in between the twins’ beds in their room. I continued to attend the same elementary school and my brother continued to attend the same middle school, but my mom would make the long trek to our bus stop every morning to drop us off. My paternal grandma moved in with my dad who was living in our old home, and she would “watch” us until my mom could pick us up after school. (We didn’t really need a babysitter at this time, but I was home a little earlier than my brother and my mom didn’t want me to be alone.) It was quite a crazy arrangement!
- We had to put together a “yearbook” for our fifth-grade class, as a sort of send-off to middle school. In the yearbook, we all listed out where we wanted to be in 20 years. Here’s what I said, “I will be a vet and I will have four daughters named April, May, Taylor, and Morgan.” DEAR GOD.
- I had my first real anxiety spiral this year, which showed up in some, erm, digestive issues. We were doing standardized testing and I just got so nervous about testing well and doing my best that I started getting really anxious about everything. When the testing was over, I had my mom pick me up from school because things were getting uncomfortable. Poor baby Steph!
Tell me a memory you have of your late elementary school years!
Wow! Fifth grade was full of so many changes for you. Parents separating, new school – no wonder you started to get anxious!
Fifth grade was tough for me, too. I had gone to one elementary school for 2nd – 4th grades, but the district changed the lines of who went to what school in the district, so I had to go to a new elementary school and the bus ride was more than an hour each way and it was exhausting. I didn’t mind so much the following year when the two elementary schools combined at the junior high and I knew everyone from both schools, but fifth grade was tough.
Until I typed it out, I didn’t realize how big 5th grade was. It was a time of so much change! I think all of the changes really hit me in 6th grade, though, and that’s where my anxiety was at its worst.
An hour-long bus ride each way is so much for an elementary-aged kid! No wonder 5th grade was tough for you!
This was so interesting to read. Grade Five was a very difficult year for me as well. There was some frenemy bullying that happened to me that year, and it was very hard. Ugh, I can hardly think of it, those girls were SO mean. I’m on Facebook now with them which is a whole other level of weird.
I was a school patrol too! I was very excited when my own boys became patrols, which they each did for two years.
I loved the spelling bee! There was a local TV show that was Spelling Bee and I was on it! I went three rounds. It was VERY exciting. To this day I get excited to spell things/ irritated when things are misspelled.
With regards to student teachers, when I was in grade 11 we had a VERY attractive male student teacher; I’m guessing he must have been 22 or so. He was HOT. I remember him standing, bent over talking to the person in the desk next to me. I nudged my friend and mimed grabbing his ass and WOULDN’T YOU KNOW, at that exact time he turned around, and my hand was right there, now very near his crotch. I was mortified. But also, imagine being him! Imagine the song Danger Zone, being a very attractive man in a room full of 16/ 17 year old girls. Wooooo boy.
NICOLE, I AM DYING AT THIS STORY ABOUT YOUR STUDENT TEACHER STORY. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I always wonder about student teachers at high schools because they aren’t too much older than the students!
That’s so cool that you were on a spelling bee show! What a neat claim to fame. 🙂
Ugh, frenemies. I think this is the age that started happening for me, too, but it got real bad in middle school for me. More to come on that!
You remember so much from elementary school! I am impressed! I don’t have super vivid memories from that time but we only had one teacher for each grade through 6th grade so there wasn’t much going in that stage. 4th grade was an awful awful year for me. I had an insane teacher who told us women were responsible for original sin since we ate the apple in the garden of eden. And this was at a public school! He had all these crazy rules, like not handing in assignments with the crinkles on the side from a spiral-bound notebook. If we forgot, he folded the paper in half, ripped off the crinkles and whatever was lost was lost… But worst of all, he had this rules about only having 3 books on your desk at a time and one time I had 4. He came over and tipped my desk backwards while I was sitting in it so all of my stuff in my desk fell out on top of me. My parents went to the principal and school board and he was fired after that year. But i had major major major anxiety that year. I would throw up before school sometimes or have to leave school because I felt sick to my stomach. He was a MONSTER.
Lisa, I am so shocked by this story of your teacher! What an awful man – someone who should NOT be a teacher. I’m glad he was fired! That kind of trauma can follow a kid for a long while and make them hate school. Such silly rules he had, too! Three books on a desk at a time?! Like, how does that even affect learning!?!? Make it make sense! Ugh. My heart goes out to 4th grade Lisa!
I loved seeing photos of you as a kid! You do remember a lot of details from these years, probably not surprising considering that some bigger changes happened for you during that period.
Now, you do have to explain what school patrol is. I am not familiar with that term (maybe we had something like that in German schools, too? Just don’t know what it entails to be a school patrol.)
A school patrol is typically a student who is in an upper grade (for me, it was anyone in 5th grade) and they are given a special badge and orange fluorescent belt to wear. They have a specific assignment, typically in a hallway to make sure that students aren’t running or doing anything that could get them in trouble. Some patrols would help out in the car line or help take the smaller students to after-school care if necessary. It was a fun lil gig!
I had so much fun reading this – and I loved seeing the pictures of you during this stage. Your relationship with your fifth grade teacher sounds wonderful – was that helpful during a stressful year for you? This also brought up so many wonderful memories for me… making me think I need to document them somehow, otherwise they may be lost forever. We had those moveable walls, too! It must have been a design “feature” of the times, LOL.
I think Mrs. Chapman really made 5th grade a wonderful year for me, even when I was in a brand-new school and going through my parents’ separation! I still think of 5th grade as one of my favorite years in school, even though I went through so much change!