Virginia Standards of Learning English Language Arts Grade 5

Imani kneels beside the west row of Aunt June's peanut field in Southampton County. The plants look like ordinary bushes, but the peanuts form under the soil, out of sight. Many leaves have turned yellow. Imani brushes dirt from her palms and says the whole row must be finished.

Aunt June pinches one yellow leaf and lets it go. Yellow can follow a dry week, a chewed stem, or nuts that are truly ready. One color does not speak for every plant in the row. She tells Imani they will take a sample: dig a few plants, from different spots, and use those to judge the rest.

At the low, wet end, the shells are soft and the kernels slip under a thumbnail. In the middle, some shells feel firm and some still give. At the higher, dry end, the shells are tight and the kernels fill them. June drops the soft plants back into their holes and presses the soil shut.

Imani wants the row to match, one harvest from end to end. June holds a soft shell next to a firm one. Pulling the wet end today would waste nuts that need more days in the ground. They harvest only the dry end and push bright stakes into the other two spots.

On the porch, Imani draws the field as three short lines instead of one long one. She labels them soft, mixed, and ready. June hangs the page by the door. Tomorrow they will sample the mixed middle again before they decide whether it can be pulled.

The ferry between Jamestown and Scotland crosses the James River with a deck that holds a line of cars. Mateo stands with his father by the cabin wall and studies a board. A clock notice names the next departure, 3:10. Beside it, a red weather card hangs from a hook and flaps when the wind turns.

Father says the two notices do different jobs. The clock tells the planned time. The red card means the crew is holding the boat because of weather. A clock that still says 3:10 does not erase a red card. Travelers have to read both before they move a car.

A single horn sounds over the lot. Mateo grabs the keys and steps toward the boarding lane. A deckhand lifts one hand and blocks him gently. One horn means the engine is being tested. It does not invite cars aboard. Two horns are the call that opens the lane.

The red card stays up while the river breaks into short white lines. Father does not ask the crew to hurry. He tells Mateo that a weather hold is a decision, not a pause someone can talk away. They stand at the rail and watch a gull slide sideways in the gusts.

At last the card comes down. Two horns follow, lower and longer than the test. The cars roll forward. On the bench inside, Mateo writes four notes: clock for the plan, red card for a hold, one horn for a test, and two horns to board.

Apple rows step down a hill near Winchester, in the Shenandoah Valley. Rosa stands at a sorting table with Mr. Pell, who lives beside her cousin's orchard. Two crates wait, one stenciled market and one stenciled cider. Rosa reaches for the biggest apple in the bin because it would make a box look full.

Mr. Pell turns that apple over. The shoulders, the area around the stem, are still green. He sets the apple in the cider crate. Size is what the eye likes first, he says, but ripeness decides the crate. A smaller apple that smells sweet and gives a little under the thumb goes into market.

Rosa frowns. Saturday buyers walk past the table quickly, and a tall box looks generous. Pell cuts a shine off another large apple and shows a brown bruise hiding under the skin. Pretty from above is not the same as sound all the way through. The bruised apple joins the green-shouldered one.

They sort until the market crate holds fruit that passes the thumb test. The cider crate holds green shoulders and hidden bruises. Nothing is thrown into the grass. Pell says the cider press uses those apples, so the sort is a choice of use, not an insult to the tree.

Rosa letters both crates with a thick pencil. Under the words she writes the test she actually used: sweet smell, slight give, no green shoulders, no hidden bruise. The biggest apple stays in cider, even though it would have made the market box look taller.

Along the Rappahannock River, tall poles hold flat wooden platforms above the water. Ospreys, birds that hunt fish, build their nests on those platforms. Many ospreys once nested in dead trees along the shore. Storms knocked some of those trees down, and others were cut when the bank was cleared. A platform gives the birds a high, open base that is less likely to fall.

The platform is not a birdhouse with walls and a little door. It is a flat square with a low rim. Ospreys pile sticks on it and line the middle with grass. From that height they can watch for fish near the surface. The people who raised the poles stay off them during nesting months. A climb then could frighten the adults away from eggs.

Ranger Cole tells a class visiting from Tappahannock that a platform does not promise chicks. It only offers a safer place to try. If a nest fails, the same birds may return the next spring. He asks the students to mark each nest active, empty, or unfinished. An unfinished nest has a scatter of sticks but no lined cup in the middle.

Through binoculars, the class watches one bird land. It carries a fish pointed headfirst. Cole says ospreys often turn a fish that way so the bird can fly more easily. A student writes the word headfirst and sketches the rim of the platform rather than the whole wide river.

A small grist mill sits on a creek in Virginia's Piedmont, where the wheel's shadow stripes the water. Miller Harun lifts the sluice, a wooden gate, and a tongue of creek water pushes the paddles. His granddaughter Leila thinks a faster wheel must make better flour. On her bicycle, faster gets her home sooner, and she expects the stones to work the same way.

Harun brings two cloth bags from a shelf. The first was ground while the wheel raced. The meal feels gritty, rough with bits that never crushed evenly. The second was ground while the wheel kept one steady turn. That meal slides smooth between the fingers. He writes the date and the word steady on the second bag.

Leila's work is to listen, not to shove the gate wide open. A knocking sound means a stone is running too dry, and the sluice should be lowered so less water hits the wheel. A smooth hum means the water and the stones agree. Harun stops while grain still covers the stones. Empty stones would rub each other and spoil the meal.

Leila rests her hand on the doorframe and waits. When a knock begins, she calls out, and Harun eases the gate down until the knock fades into the hum. She smiles because she heard the trouble before she saw it. On the walk home she tells her father that faster had been the wrong goal for flour.

Saturday crowds move between the canvas awnings at the farmers market in Roanoke. Ms. Adeyemi stacks tomatoes in round baskets. A sign is posted on the front edge of the table, where shoppers pause and read it before they choose. A full basket of sound tomatoes has one price. Tomatoes with cracks go in a wooden sauce box and cost less.

A customer lifts a cracked tomato that is still a deep red. He offers extra money because he wants that exact tomato in a photograph. Ms. Adeyemi smiles, thanks him, and sets the tomato back in the sauce box. The crack decides the box, she says. A bigger offer does not rewrite the sign.

Her son Malik slides two cracked tomatoes under a layer of smooth ones. From the front, the basket looks perfect. His mother lifts the smooth tomatoes off and shows him the cracks again. A hidden crack is still a crack. Buyers should see the fruit they are taking home, not a disguise.

Malik letters a small card and props it on the sauce box: cracks go to sauce, even if the color is bright. A girl reads the card and chooses a cracked tomato on purpose for her family's pot. Malik watches the honest box empty, one scarred red fruit at a time, and does not hide another crack.

Nia and Uncle Ellis walk a pasture fence in Loudoun County, checking bluebird boxes in the cool of early spring. Before any eggs are laid, they may open a box, clear out a soaked nest, and write what they find. After eggs appear, they leave the door shut. A disturbed adult might abandon the nest, flying off and not coming back to warm the eggs.

Box 2 is stuffed with straw that sticks out of the entrance hole. Nia is sure a wren has taken the box, and she wants the door open so she can prove it. Ellis slides a small side window instead of the door. Four blue eggs sit in a neat cup. They close the window at once, before their shadows stay on the eggs.

The chart in Ellis's folder has a row for each box: the date, the number, and whether they saw eggs, chicks, or an empty cup. Nia starts to write wren. Ellis taps the blue eggs she just saw. A guess is not a record, he says. She erases the word and writes four eggs.

At box 3, ants stream up the pole. The cup inside is empty, so they can work without worrying about a sitting bird. Ellis sets the pole base onto a metal skirt, a smooth collar that ants struggle to cross. The skirt is a fix for ants. It is not a reason to open box 2 again. That door stays shut for the rest of the walk.

Instructor Dana meets her class on a gravel bank of the James River near Richmond. Before anyone touches a canoe, she names three rules. Life jackets are fastened first. Paddlers stay behind the lead canoe. No one stands up to point at something in the current.

Downstream, a fallen sycamore leans into the river. Water slips through the branches, but a boat could be caught and held against them. Dana calls the tree a strainer. She has the class land above it. They will portage: lift the canoes, carry them on a path along the bank, and set them back in the water below the limbs.

Jules wants to paddle close enough to touch a pale branch. He says the water there looks slow, almost tired. Dana shakes her head. Looking from the gravel is close enough. Slow water can still press a boat into the limbs and pin it. The class carries the boats, gunwales bumping their knees, around the bend.

On the way back, the wind has dropped and the river looks gentle. Jackets stay buckled. Jules writes three lines on a waterproof card: jacket first, follow the lead, carry around a strainer. He does not add a fourth line about touching the tree.

The school garden in Norfolk keeps a chart nailed to the fence. One column reads returns to soil. The other reads stays trash. Fruit peels, crushed eggshells, and dry leaves go into the compost bin. Plastic forks and coated juice boxes go into the can. After several warm weeks, the compost turns dark and crumbly, and the class mixes it into the carrot bed.

Owen, new to fifth grade, drops a plastic fork into the bin. Ketchup smears the handle, so he thinks it belongs with the lunch scraps. Garden lead Ms. Shah lifts it out with a glove. Dirty is not the same as able to break down. In this garden, break down means rot into bits that can become soil. A fork stays a fork, ketchup or not.

Owen studies the two columns. He writes plastic fork under stays trash. Then he finds his name on yesterday's list, where the fork had been placed in the wrong column. He draws one line through that mistake so the error can still be seen and the correction sits beside it.

At cleanup, a younger student tosses a juice box toward the compost. Owen taps the chart and points to the shiny coat on the box. That coat will not turn into the dark soil the carrots use. The student walks the box to the trash can, and Owen holds the lid open.

In a choir room in Richmond, director Mr. Lang stops the group halfway through a river song they will sing at a neighborhood church. Several voices push the next phrase louder, trying to cover a note that arrived late. Amina watches the clock. The concert is two days away, and she wants the piece finished, not taken apart.

Lang asks for less sound, not more. He points to a breath comma, a small mark that shows where the choir should take air together. Then he talks about the entrance. Amina had come in after the altos had already started. He wants every voice to begin at the same instant. Singing louder will not repair a late start. They sing only four measures, stop, and sing those measures again.

Amina marks the comma with a blue pencil. She whispers the count under her breath instead of watching the minute hand. The late note had been hers. When she begins with the alto line, the chord settles. The phrase is quieter than the covered-up version and steadier from the first beat.

After rehearsal she does not brag about singing over anyone. She shows a friend the blue mark. Two days is enough time, she says, if they keep returning to the same four measures until the entrance is shared.

Dusk cools a campground in the Blue Ridge. A red fox slips along the edge of the picnic area, ears forward, paws quiet on damp leaves. Luis raises his camera. A corner of his cheese sandwich is still in his free hand. If he tosses it, the fox might step close enough to fill the frame.

Ranger Patel speaks from the porch, not loud enough to startle the animal. Food from people teaches a fox to beg, to trot up to tables looking for handouts. A fox that begs can be struck by a car in the camp road or made sick by food that is wrong for it. Patel does not grab the sandwich. He waits until Luis lowers it.

They watch from the rail. The fox leaps, pins a pale moth, and slides under a rhododendron. No crust is thrown. Luis keeps the picture he already took, small and far, the fox a rust-colored shape between two trees. His sister says the animal is only a blur.

Luis writes no food on the camp card and taps the blur with his thumb. He tells her the blur is the true visit. The fox hunted its own moth. A bigger picture would have been a trick, and the trick would have stayed with the animal after the campers drove home.

Mrs. Cho works as bridge tender where a drawbridge crosses the Elizabeth River and the road never seems to rest. A green lamp facing the cars means drivers may cross. A long horn from a boat means a captain is asking for an opening. The horn by itself does not lift anything. It only starts the request.

Cho keeps one hand near the lever that raises the span, the moving section of the bridge. She will not lift that section while the lamp is green. First the red gates drop and the roadway clears. Only then does the span rise, the boat pass, and the span settle back into the road. The lamp turns green again after the gates go up.

One afternoon a driver honks and waves his cap. He is late, and the boat in the channel looks small from his seat. Cho leaves the lever alone. Being late does not let a driver skip the order. Her trainee, Ben, watches the gates lock. The boat slides through the gap, and the waiting cars click their turn signals.

When the lamp is green again, Ben copies the order into a notebook: horn, gates, open, boat, close, green lamp. He underlines gates twice. The horn began the request, he writes in the margin, but the gates made the request safe.

January quilts the creek with ice, a thin cloth stitched by the wind. My brother calls the ice a window, but the window will not open under our boots.

A heron is the only dark stitch standing in that pale cloth. We count to twenty, and it does not fly. Waiting, I think, is its kind of work.

I brought a loud plan for the walk and a stick to crack the ice. The heron turns one yellow eye toward us. My stick stays on my shoulder.

We leave the quilt where we found it. The path home smells like wet pine. My brother says the window held. I say the heron kept the seam.

In a maritime museum in Newport News, a model workboat sits under glass. The card in front of the case says the boat fished only for crabs. Guide Mr. Benton lays a builder's notebook from 1934 on a side table. The pages list crab pots. They also list a net used for fish in the spring. The card is right about crabs and silent about the rest.

Student Priya reaches for the card, ready to drop it in the bin beside the bench. Benton asks her to wait. They will revise the label after checking the notebook, changing the words so they match the source. He does not want the old sentence to vanish as if nobody had ever trusted it.

The new card says the model shows a workboat used for crabs and, in spring, for fish. It adds that an earlier card mentioned only crabs. Priya clips the old card behind the new one. A visitor can lift the front card and see what changed. The year 1934 is printed at the bottom, naming the notebook.

A boy asks which card is the real one. Priya says both are real records of different moments. One shows what the museum used to state. The other shows what the notebook supports now. Benton nods and leaves the clip where her fingers set it.

The bakery on a brick side street in Staunton smells like flour and orange peel. Mrs. Whitlock slides a taped chart toward her nephew Caleb. The morning loaf needs a spot near 85 degrees and 45 quiet minutes before it meets the oven. Caleb has watched the bowl for two minutes. He already wants to help the dough along.

He shifts the bowl to a higher shelf beside the oven vent. The dough springs up, shines, and then slumps into a wrinkled disk. Whitlock calls the failure an overproof. The dough rose too long in heat that was too strong, so the strands inside weakened and could not hold the loaf up. Poking the top every minute had not saved it. The chart would have.

The next morning Caleb sets a timer and lays a thermometer beside the bowl. He keeps his hands in his apron pocket. When the bell rings, the loaf holds a round top and bakes to an even crust. Whitlock cuts him the heel of the loaf and does not call the result luck.

Caleb prints a line at the bottom of the chart: timer, not poking. He leaves a note about the fallen loaf on the same page, so the mistake stays visible next to the repair. His aunt says a bakery remembers both the loaf that slumped and the one that stood.

After a hard rain, the science club meets on a greenway beside the Rivanna River in Charlottesville. Ms. Ortiz hands out two jars and a pencil. Spot A is just below a storm drain that still trickles. Spot B is upstream, where the water runs thin over pale stones. The students fill each jar, cap it, and hold both toward the bright part of the sky.

The downstream jar looks like weak tea. The upstream jar is clear enough that Andre can read his pencil through the glass. He snaps both caps tight and says the poster for the hallway should announce that the drain ruined the river. He wants the sentence large, in red marker.

Ortiz taps the data sheet they have already started. A claim, she tells them, is a statement they will stand behind with what they actually observed. Today's notes show the date, the rain, and one difference: after this storm, water below the drain was cloudier than water above it. That record does not prove the drain harms the whole river on every day.

Andre crosses out the large sentence until the letters ghost through. He copies the smaller statement underneath. If next week is dry, the club will fill the same two jars at the same two spots. Ortiz says a second day will not erase this one. It will show whether the pattern remains when the weather changes.

Petersburg's train station hums with suitcase wheels. Cousins Elena and Jay tip their heads back to read the board above the benches. Track 1 is listed for the northbound train that will carry them toward Richmond, where their grandmother is waiting. A yellow delay slip is taped under that line. Jay shifts his bag from hand to hand. He does not want to be the cousin who arrives last.

A whistle blows from the yard, sudden and proud. Jay starts for a stairway that leads to a different platform. Elena catches his sleeve. Station agent Mr. Brooks points at the slip, not at the sound outside. A delay means the train is late. If the trip were canceled, the train would not be coming. This slip says twenty minutes late, and it names the same track.

Brooks adds that the whistle belongs to a freight train. Freight cars do not take passengers, even when the sound makes people turn. Jay's ears are still full of it. He sits anyway, knees bouncing. Elena opens a folded map of Richmond, and they find the small green square where their grandmother said she would stand.

The yellow slip comes down. The board flashes the word boarding beside Track 1. Jay reads it twice before he stands. They take the stairs the board names, not the ones the whistle had suggested. Elena folds the map along its old crease. The twenty minutes felt long, and they belonged to the right train.