Here are a few things I remember from when I was in fifth or sixth grades...

concerto: I took up the violin in fifth grade, my last year of grade school.
I remember that we had put 'frets' on the neck of the istrumment made out of rubber bands, and we played off of sheet music that resembled guitar tableture than real sheet music.

I had a vague idea that next year I was going to be going to Kinewa middle school the next year, but this was before the fifth grade orientation, so it haden't occored to me that next year I was going to be bussed to a school miles away from my home. My elementary school was a neighborhood school positioned near the border with East Lansing. The value of the homes in the subdivision where most of the kids came from was much less than the subdivisions deeper into Okemos. We even had some kids from a trailer park hidden behind Tom's party store, one of whom's residents could easily have been mistaken for the "human beatbox" from The Fat Boys (he liked to make the "scratching" sound by inhaling and exhaling). At the end of the school year, I had my first introduction to the upper middle class residents of deepest Okemos. I only remember two things; the kids from upper middle class families seemedd to resent having to share the stage with the kids from my school. This is probably due to the fact that half of them had been in montisory school, and had been playing since age five, and they found the simple tunes the fifth graders from Wardcliff (my school) were able to play benieth contempt. The other thing I remember is that right before the curtain rose, I noticed that the backdrop of the stage was black, and, since I was wearing black dress pants, I would appear to the audience that I was a floating torso playing a violin. When I vocalised this thought to my neighbor, he cotemeptuously put me down for saying something so obvious.

Shop classIn sixth grade I made small birds made out of wood. I also got the shp teacher mad at me when I decided to emulate the martial artist's demonstration of strength by trying to break a thick piece of wood with a headbutt. It really hurt, and I was dizzy for quite a while.

Dracula Mask I made a plaster mask in my seventh grade media class, which I colored in with a little red and black magic marker so it sort of looked like a vampire. I also got ahold of some rince-off sparkly silver spray paint to put in my hair. Before going out to trick-or-treat, I slicked down my hair with vaseline and sprayed a line of silver paint from the center forehead to the back of my head, and put on the vampire mask, and a red cape. I remember 2 things from that evening. I took the spray paint with me, and I painted a 3 foot wide circled pentile in the street 1 block away from my house (a dumb move, since the paint would wash away with the next rain). I also remeber knocking on an Asian family's door, and bowing down low to show them my hair. A minute later it occored to me that this was probably inapropriate, since the guy answering the door might be offended by the gesture. The next day, I was horrified to discover that vaseline does not shampoo out of hair despite multiple rince and repeat.