I have loved the first week of being in the 5th grade classroom! for the first couple of days we just watched and helped the kids when they were doing work, and just kind of figuring out how our teacher handles the classroom. he does a money system for rewards and for punishment, he also has a system set up where every student has a job, and it keeps the whole class in working order so I was really impressed with that.
We got the opportunity to teach on Thursday. For Social studies, science, and Language arts, so we actually taught science. Our lesson was on earthquakes, first we showed them a digital story that Bryant made and had them fill out a short worksheet during the video, then we did a seismograph activity where I had made one (a table with a chair on top of it and a string tied the the bottom of the chair and a marker at the other end of the string and paper on the table under the chair that the marker was touching) and showed them how scientist measure the intensity of an earthquake. then the students either made a visual art project on a paper showing one of the types of faults, or built a structure with Popsicle sticks and put it on a "fault" (two Kleenex boxes side by side) to show what the motion of the fault looked like. then each group presented their project with 2 facts about earthquakes.
since they do rotations we taught the lesson three times, the first time it was really crazy and we had to make some adjustments for the next two lessons, we went over the instructions for the projects step by step and had the students tell us after what the steps were, so the next two lessons went a lot smother. anyway, it was really fun and harder than I expected.