New Jersey Student Learning Assessments English Language Arts Grade 5

Bramble Dock, New Jersey, holds Lantern Night on the first Friday of fall. People carry paper lanterns with candles while the evening ferry leaves the town dock. Priya Shah and Ellis Ward were both there that Friday, and each wrote a firsthand note about the same evening.

Priya Shah, a fifth grader, wrote, "I stood by the bait shop at six. The dock was full, and a man's elbow bumped my lantern. The candle went out. The ferry whistle blew twice, and the boat left. I had wanted to see lights on the water. I never reached the rail. Shoes scraped, people said excuse me, and the whistle hurt my ears. Lantern Night felt like a crowded hallway that happened to be outside."

Ellis Ward, who owns the bait shop, wrote, "I watched from the shop window at six. The dock was full, and I saw a man's elbow bump a student's lantern. A taller student lit the candle again. The ferry whistle blew twice, and the boat left. Neighbors lifted a stroller over the loose board by the ramp. After the whistle, voices dropped, and a line of lanterns showed on the bay. The crowded minutes were real. So was the quiet that followed. Lantern Night is how Bramble Dock still meets on the first fall Friday."

Cape May County boards remember summer, but January keeps that secret. Salt sleeps in the railing cracks, and the gulls argue over nothing.

My scarf snaps like a small flag. The snack window wears a shutter. Wind writes a long sentence down the empty ramp, then rubs it out.

I came for the quiet mile, not for taffy or a ticket line. The ocean folds and unfolds, and the town lets the cold have a turn.

Hollow Reed Bog is in Burlington County, New Jersey. The growers flood the cranberry beds before the wet harvest. Water lifts the ripe berries because the berries have small air pockets. Workers then gather the floating fruit with booms. A boom is a long floating tube that fences the berries into a corner.

Ms. Feldman's class arrived after the beds were flooded but before the booms moved. She said the order mattered. First the beds fill with water. Next, machines loosen the berries from the vines. Then the booms draw the red mass toward a conveyor. Last, a truck takes the berries to the cleaning barn. Skipping a step could leave fruit on the vines or send leaves into the truck.

A chart by the barn door showed two harvests. The wet harvest uses floodwater and booms, and those berries go for juice. The dry harvest uses walk-behind pickers and no flood, and those berries are sold in bags. Dry-harvest berries must not be flooded, so water would be a problem for that method. The sign under the chart said, "Water is a tool in one harvest and a problem in the other."

I wanted a picture of the Great Falls in Paterson and then a pretzel. Our guide, Ms. Ruiz, walked us past the viewing fence to a stone channel called a raceway. "The falls are the loud part," she said. "This channel is the part that went to work."

I did not see the channel doing any job. Brown water slid along the stones and disappeared toward old mill walls. Ms. Ruiz explained that builders had directed river water into the raceway. They guided it along that path so mills could turn wheels even when people stood far from the falling water. The falls supplied the power. The raceway delivered it.

My friend Andre pointed at a dry side gate. A small sign said the gate could stop the flow when workers needed to repair a wheel. Andre asked why anyone would turn off such a strong river. Ms. Ruiz said they did not turn off the whole river. They closed one gate and left the falls running.

On the bus I still had no pretzel. I did have a sentence for my report. The picture shows the noise, and the raceway shows the plan.

Bay Glass Lighthouse is a small tower on a point along the Jersey Shore. Our class read one page from a copied keeper's notebook. The page was dated March 12, 1904, and the ink had faded to the color of weak tea. Keeper Alma Briggs had written, "Lamp lit at 5:40. Wind east. Two fishing boats rounded the point after dusk. I logged them because the point hides rocks at that tide."

Our teacher, Mr. Chen, said a log is a record made at the time, not a story written years later. Alma's short lines answered three questions a sailor might ask later: when the lamp was lit, where the wind came from, and which boats passed. She did not add how she felt about the cold.

On the next line she wrote, "Trimmed the wick. Smoke mark on the glass, cleaned before midnight." Mr. Chen asked why that sentence belonged in a log. Lila said it proved the light stayed bright. A dirty glass could dim the the beam even if the lamp was lit on time.

I had thought a lighthouse notebook would be full of adventures. This page was a list of checks. Mr. Chen said the list was what made the water safer. Someone far out had needed those plain facts.

On Saturday the school garden club set up two tables at a community lot in Newark. The tables stood side by side, and they did not follow the same rule.

Mr. Santos ran the greens table. He sold only leaves picked that morning. Prices were on a blue card. When the basket was empty, he closed the table. A neighbor offered yesterday's lettuce, and it still looked crisp. Mr. Santos refused it. "If it was not picked today, it does not belong in this basket," he said.

Ms. Okonkwo ran the jar table. She sold peaches and tomato sauce that had been put up in August. Put up meant the fruit and tomatoes had been cooked and sealed in jars then. Every jar on the table had a date. A jar without a date went under the table, not on it. She could sell all afternoon because the food had been preserved earlier. She did not sell fresh greens.

A customer asked if the two tables were really one shop. Ms. Okonkwo pointed at the blue card and then at a dated lid. "Same morning," she said, "but not the same kind of ready."

Kiln Point is a town on a creek in Ocean County, New Jersey. A wooden footbridge links the school to the library path. Winter ice cracked two planks. The town council printed a one-page guide before Thursday's meeting.

The problem section said the cracks are wide enough for a boot heel. Until repairs happen, the bridge is safe only for walking one at a time. Bikes and strollers already use the long road instead.

Proposal Cedar keeps the wood. Workers would replace the cracked planks and add a stronger rail. The guide said this plan costs less and matches the old path, but the new planks would still need paint every spring.

Proposal Iron replaces the whole walking surface with metal grating, a walking surface punched with holes. It costs more at first. The guide said ice would melt through the holes faster, and paint would not be needed. Some neighbors wrote that metal would look wrong beside the cedar trees.

The last section was blank on purpose. The page said, "The council listens on Thursday. This page compares plans. It does not choose one."

At Reed's Cove, on the New Jersey side of Delaware Bay, a science class walked the beach in May with gloves and a tally sheet. Horseshoe crabs had come ashore to lay eggs. Waves had flipped some of them, and those crabs could not turn back over. Their tails are called telsons. A telson is for steering and flipping, not for stinging. A sign said, "A telson is a tool, not a weapon. Lifting a crab by the telson can injure that tail."

Ms. Brooks showed the rule. If a crab is on its back and its legs wave, pick it up by the sides of the shell. Set it down at the water's edge, facing the bay. Never lift it by the telson. Never carry it to a bucket. The tally sheet had two columns, Turned and Left Alone. A crab already moving toward the water went in Left Alone.

Jonah wanted to turn every crab he saw. He reached for one that was halfway into a wave. Ms. Brooks stopped him. "That one is solving the problem," she said. "Your tally marks help. Extra handling does not." By noon Jonah's sheet showed twelve in Turned and twenty in Left Alone. The second number surprised him. Helping, on that beach, included knowing when to keep his hands off.

The local-history drawer at Cape Shelf Library, in the town of Salt Hollow, New Jersey, held one map of the 1920 marsh. The word legend was printed in a box at the corner. I thought a legend was an old story, so I looked for a paragraph. The box held no story. It held symbols. A blue dash meant a ditch. A green dot meant a cedar. A black square meant a house that is gone.

Librarian Mrs. Pell said, "On a map, the legend is the key that tells what the marks mean. It is not a tale." She covered the box with her hand and asked me to guess a symbol. I guessed that the blue dashes were roads. I was wrong. Without the legend I could not tell a ditch from a path.

Then she uncovered the box. The blue dashes matched the straight wet lines in an old photo. The black squares matched names on a list of houses lost in a storm. The legend did not make the storm exciting. It made the marks readable. I wrote in my notes, "A story-legend and a map-legend share a word and not a job."

Room 12 keeps a log for the roof garden above a Jersey City school. In April the students carried soil up in buckets because the elevator was reserved for freight that day. They planted lettuce and bush beans in waist-high boxes. The lettuce was ready first. They cut it three times. The beans needed poles and were picked once, in June, when the pods were full.

A windstorm in May tipped the empty watering can but did not tip the boxes. The janitor, Mr. Hale, had bolted the boxes to the roof rails in March, fastening each box so the wind could not tip it. The log said, "Bolt first, then soil, then seed."

Lina wanted to write that the storm was the most important event. Ms. Ortiz said the log should show the order that kept the garden safe, not only the exciting day. For the hallway bulletin, Lina had to summarize the spring in two sentences. She wrote, "We planted lettuce and beans in bolted boxes and harvested the lettuce before the beans. The May wind knocked over a can, but the boxes stayed because they were bolted in March."

Ms. Ortiz posted those two sentences. A longer draft about every bucket was returned to the folder. The bulletin needed the harvest order and the storm result, not a list of every trip up the stairs.

After the March nor'easter, Dunlin Beach, a shore town in New Jersey, lost a strip of sand from the front of the dune. The town crew did not truck in sand the next morning. They set up sand fences in a line parallel to the water. The fences are short slat fences. The town science page said wind blows loose sand, and the slats slow the wind. Slowed wind drops the sand it carries. Grain by grain, a dune can grow back on the inland side of the fence.

The page listed what the fences do not do. They do not block a storm surge, the high rush of seawater a storm pushes onto land. They do not replace a dune that has already washed away in one night. Their job is to catch sand on ordinary windy days after the storm.

A diagram used three arrows. A long arrow showed fast wind over open beach. A short arrow showed slower wind at the fence. A dotted arrow showed sand falling. The caption said, "Speed changes first. The dune is the result, not the first step."

The class measured the fence height at four feet. The crew captain, Ms. Adeyemi, said height matters less than the gaps between slats. If the slats were solid, wind would jump the fence and drop the sand too far away. The gaps let some wind through and make the drop happen nearby.

The River Room at the Millstone Children's Museum, in Millstone, New Jersey, has a model of a creek with working locks. I pressed the button that fills the tiny lock. My brother Theo said the button was cheating because a real boat crew would crank a gate by hand. He folded his arms and read only the plaque about mule teams on the old canal.

I still think the button belongs in the room. The plaque says the model uses pumps so visitors can see the water rise in one minute. A real lock took longer. Historically exact would mean matching that longer wait from the past. The museum is not pretending the minute copies it. A second sign says, "Watch the level. Then read why crews waited."

Theo's favorite sentence was about the mules. Mine was about the rising water. We were looking at the same model and collecting different lessons. Mom asked each of us to tell one fact before we argued about the button. Theo said mules pulled boats along the canal. I said water in the lock raises or lowers a boat between levels. Both facts were printed in the room. The argument was about which fact deserved the first look.

The path beside the canal near Kingston, New Jersey, is flat because mules once needed a level place to walk. They pulled boats along the Delaware and Raritan Canal. A rope from the mule's harness reached the boat. The animal stayed on the path, called a towpath, and the boat stayed in the water. If the path had steep stairs, the mule could not pull the boat.

Today the boats and mules are gone. Bikes and walkers use the same level path. A sign at the trailhead compares the two uses. Then: a mule, a rope, and a loaded boat. Now: people, helmets, and no rope. The width is similar. The traffic is not. Mules walked in one work direction on a schedule. Riders now pass both ways and must call out before they pass.

The sign's last line says the flatness is a clue. "When a trail is this level beside the water, ask what work kept it level." Our teacher had us answer in our notebooks. The work was towing, not racing. The bikes came later and borrowed a path shaped by an older job.

Aunt Nia pinned three cards above her rye-bread table at a street fair in Hoboken. The blue card was labeled Rise. It said the dough rests for 90 minutes in a warm corner before it is shaped. During those minutes Aunt Nia sets a timer and helps other customers. She is waiting, not kneading the whole time.

The red card was labeled Bake. It said the loaves bake for 40 minutes. That time is heat and watching. She does not leave the oven window then.

A boy asked if he could add 90 and 40 and tell friends the bread takes 130 minutes of her work. Aunt Nia shook her head. "The cards are different jobs with different minutes," she said. "Waiting is not the same as standing at the oven."

A small white card was labeled Salt. It said the salt is mixed in at the start, not sprinkled on at the fair. A customer offered to add flaky salt on top for free. Aunt Nia said no. The flavor was already decided in the kitchen. The table was for selling loaves, not for rewriting the recipe.

By noon the blue timer had started a new batch in the kitchen tent, and the red timer was on loaves in the oven. The two clocks ran on the same morning and did not measure the same task.

The houses on poles behind Shore Acre School, in Cape May County, are for purple martins. Martins are swallows that nest in groups. A sheet on the pole calls the group a colony. On this sheet, colony means the birds sharing the houses. It does not mean a settlement from a history book. Each house has many rooms. The sheet says that if only one pair moves in, the colony has not really formed.

Martins arrive in spring and leave in late summer. They eat flying insects. The sheet tells students not to feed them bread. Bread fills a bird without giving it the insects it hunts. The pole is housing, not a picnic.

Mr. Ellis lowers the houses once a week on a pulley to check the rooms. He looks for mud nests of other birds that might take a room before the martins return. He removes those nests only before the martins arrive. After martins have eggs, he records the room and does not clear it. The pulley lets him check the houses without a ladder. A note in red says, "Lower slowly. A fast drop can crack eggs."

I stood in the wing during our class play at a school in Morristown. The play, Night Boat, was one we wrote, and it was not a history lesson. A cue is the word or sound that tells the next person to begin. My card had three cues: a bell, the line "light it now," and a silence of five seconds.

The silence was the hardest. The actor playing the ferry captain wanted to speak sooner. Our teacher, Ms. Duran, had written the pause so the audience could hear the recorded gulls. From the seats, my cousin thought the pause was a mistake. At intermission she said the captain forgot the line. I could see the card. The captain was obeying it. The same moment looked like an error from the audience and like a planned cue from the wing.

The scenes were in time order: loading the boat, lighting the lantern, then crossing. The program said, "Scenes follow the trip. They do not flash back." That structure helped me track cues. The bell stayed before the line, and the line stayed before the quiet. If a scene had jumped to morning and back, my three cues could have come at the wrong moment in the story.

The Heron Creek boardwalk crosses a preserve in Ocean County, New Jersey. It has three kinds of signs, and each kind uses a different shape. Circle signs give rules. A circle with a boot crossed out means stay on the boards. A circle with a crab crossed out means do not collect animals. Triangle signs give warnings. A triangle with a wave means the planks may be slippery when the tide is high. A triangle with a bird means nesting season, so voices should stay low. Rectangle signs give facts. A rectangle may tell how far the creek travels or what the cordgrass does.

Our worksheet asked us to sort one new message: "Nesting egrets are in the grass this month." I started to call it a rule because it sounded serious. Mr. Patel said serious is not a shape. The sentence states what is there. It belongs on a rectangle. If the staff adds a command such as "whisper" or "keep out," the message is no longer only a fact.

At the end of the walk I made a table with three headings: Rule, Warning, and Fact. The boot message went under Rule. The slippery-plank message went under Warning. The creek's length went under Fact. The table matched the shapes. My first guess, sorting by how strict the words sounded, did not.