The Classical Academy of Sarasota · Fifth Grade

The Class Pet Project

A family guide to the first-quarter writing project

Four animals. Fifty-seven reports. Not one student chooses the animal they argue for — only how well they argue for it.

Every student writesTheir own report — writing, drawings, ledger, and a name

Every sourceComes from the classroom. No internet, at any stage.

The voteThree rounds — group, then class, then the whole fifth grade

The gradeThe writing only. Not the animal that wins.

Inside this guide

01The four candidates2
05Week-by-week tracker6
02The one rule3
06How one animal wins7
03Every student’s own work4
07Final outcomes & what helps at home8
04What they are actually learning5

Sheena Gomez Fifth Grade · Writing & Grammar www.classpetproject.comQuarter One · Aug 27 – Oct 7, 2026

Fifth Grade · The Classical Academy of Sarasota

The class is getting a pet.

Four animals are in the running. Your child doesn’t get to pick which one they argue for — only how well they argue for it.

Quarter One 4 candidates 57 students, 57 reports Reports due Oct 7 3 rounds of voting

Sometime this fall, one small animal is going to move into the fifth grade. Which one is not up to me, and it isn’t up to any single student either. It comes down to fifty-seven pieces of writing and three rounds of voting.

Here is the part that surprises people: students don’t choose their animal. Each one is assigned a candidate from the four below and has to make the strongest possible case for it — whether or not that was the one they were hoping for. Arguing well for something you didn’t pick is a much harder skill than arguing for something you love, and it is the skill I want them to leave this quarter with.

It is a writing project wearing a very appealing disguise. Everything we are working on this quarter — structure, evidence, sentence openers, the grammar we are drilling in Well-Ordered Language — goes straight into a document a fifth grader actually wants to get right.

The four candidates 01

Each one is a real possibility, and each one is difficult in its own way. There is no easy assignment in this group.

Candidate 01

Bearded Dragon

The largest candidate by a wide margin. Wants a big enclosure, basking and UVB bulbs replaced on a schedule, live insects and fresh greens daily, and about a decade of all of it. The heaviest budget on the list.

Candidate 02

Guinea Pig

Loud, social, and the most hands-on of the four. Fresh vegetables every day, a cage cleaned more than once a week, and a strong preference for not being left alone on a Saturday.

A red betta fish with long, ruffled flowing fins against a black background

Candidate 03

GlowBetta Fish

The quietest option and the easiest to watch for a long time. Needs a heated, filtered tank of its own — and absolutely no roommates, which is a fact worth arguing about.

Candidate 04

Hermit Crab

Trades up to a larger shell as it grows, so an honest budget has to include shells it doesn’t need yet. Wants humidity, wants company, and hides for days at a time while it molts.

The one rule 02

Every fact in these reports must come from the sources I hand out in class. Nothing else.

I know this one runs against instinct, so I want to be completely direct about it: students should not be doing outside research of any kind. Not at school, not at home, not “just to check something.” The stack of books and articles on their desk is the whole world for this project, and a report built on anything else has to be rewritten.

No internet searching, at any stage
No AI assistants or chatbots
No outside books, videos, or pet-store printouts
No screens in any presentation
No looking it up together at the kitchen table
No facts a child can’t point to on a page

This is slower than looking it up, and that is exactly the point. A child who has to find the answer in a book reads differently than one who types a question — she skims, she doubles back, she learns what a good source feels like in her hands. If a student claims a hermit crab needs a second shell within the year, they have to show me the page it came from.

If your child gets stuck, the answer is not a search bar. The answer is to bring the question back to class, where I can point them at the right paragraph. Getting stuck and unstuck is most of what I am teaching this quarter.

Every student’s own work 03

There is no divided-up group project here, and no one piece of paper with five names on it. Every child in the fifth grade produces a complete report of their own — all four parts, start to finish, in their own hand.

Part 01

The writing

Their own case for their assigned animal, built from the classroom sources and structured the way we have been practicing all quarter.

Part 02

The drawings

Their own study of the animal and its habitat, using the techniques they are learning in art class. Observation, not decoration.

Part 03

The ledger

Their own numbers — the animal, the habitat, the food, the bedding, the vet — added up for a full year, without rounding in their own favor.

Part 04

The name

Each child proposes a name for the animal and defends it in writing. This is the part that is entirely, unmistakably theirs.

The group shares resources, encouragement, and feedback. It does not share the work.

Four or five students are assigned the same animal and sit together with the same stack of books. They trade what they find, read each other’s drafts, argue about whose numbers are right, and talk each other through the hard afternoon in week three. What they do not do is split the assignment four ways.

I want them working alongside one another rather than depending on one another — so that a student who is out sick for two days has lost some good company, not their grade. The one thing they may do together is stand up as a group and pitch the class on why their animal is best. That part is a shared performance. Everything that gets graded is individual.

What they are actually learning 04

A class pet is the reason a fifth grader will happily rewrite a paragraph four times. Underneath the animal, this is our writing and grammar curriculum doing exactly what it was built to do — and pulling four other subjects along with it.

Writing

IEW — Frontiers in Writing

This project is the reason to move through the units rather than around them. A single report asks students to do nearly everything the program teaches:

Key word outlines taken from the sources, then writing from those notes rather than from memory
Summarizing multiple references — pulling one clear paragraph out of several articles that don’t quite agree
Writing from pictures — turning their own habitat drawings back into prose
Dress-ups, sentence openers, and decorations, checked line by line
A persuasive close: the strongest reason, saved for last

Most fifth grades cover about one unit a month and never reach the later ones. I would rather they arrive there this quarter, while they still care how the argument turns out.

Grammar

Well-Ordered Language 2B

Grammar stops being a worksheet the moment a sentence has a job to do. The structures we take apart on Monday are the ones they have to build on Thursday:

Sentences diagrammed in class, then written into their own drafts on purpose
Phrases and clauses used to pack more evidence into fewer, better sentences
Strong verbs and precise modifiers instead of “really” and “a lot”
Reading their own work aloud to hear where a sentence collapses

By the end, a student should be able to point at a sentence they wrote and tell you why it is built that way.

And four more subjects arrive through the writing — not as add-ons, but because an honest report about a living animal cannot be written without them.

Science

Biology

Habitat, diet, life cycle, and what an animal actually needs to stay well. They learn to read a description of a living thing closely enough to explain it to someone else.

History

Ancient Greece

The Greeks were the first in the West to write down careful animal observations, and the first to teach persuasion as a discipline worth learning. Our students are doing both at once, which is not a coincidence.

Art

Observation drawing

The techniques they are learning in art class, applied to a real animal and its habitat. Drawing something carefully is one of the fastest ways to notice what you had not noticed.

Math

The real cost

Unit prices, recurring costs, and a twelve-month total that has to hold up. Money math stops being abstract when the number decides whether your argument is any good.

Week-by-week tracker 05

Here is the whole quarter at a glance, so you can follow along without having to ask twice. Tick each week off as it passes — on this page your check marks are saved on your own device, and on paper a pencil works just as well.

Done Week In class At home you’ll see

Aug 27–28 Animals assigned · key word outlines beginGroups are formed, each is given its candidate, and we start the very first day with key word outlines from the opening sources. Strong opinions about which animal they got, and which one they wanted. Week of Aug 31 Research & outliningWorking through the source stack, one key word outline per article. Lots of dead ends, which is fine — a dead end is a finding. Notebook pages filling up. Questions they are not allowed to look up. Week of Sept 7 Writing from notesFirst paragraphs built from their own outlines rather than from memory, and several sources pulled into one clear passage. Sentences read aloud to no one in particular. Week of Sept 14 The ledgerReal prices, real totals, a full year of costs added up honestly. Arithmetic at the dinner table. Sticker shock about vet bills. Week of Sept 21 First full draftThe whole case written properly, with evidence attached to every claim and the strongest reason saved for last. A draft they may want to read aloud to you. Let them. Week of Sept 28 Drawings & revisionHabitat studies using art-class techniques, and a hard second pass on the writing. Sketching. A lot of erasing. Possibly a request for better pencils. Oct 5–7 Reports due Wednesday, Oct 7Every student turns in their own finished report: writing, drawings, ledger, and name. Quarter one closes on that work alone. Relief. And a name they are quietly hoping wins. Fall break Nothing at allThe project rests. No assignments, no research, no pet talk required. A break. There will still be pet talk. Quarter 2 Voting beginsThree rounds, group to class to grade — see below. Campaigning. Lobbying. Possibly a slogan.

How one animal wins 06

Nothing is decided by whoever shouts loudest. A proposal has to survive three separate votes, and the circle of people it must persuade widens each time.

Round one

Within the group

Everyone at the table has written about the same animal and proposed their own name for it. They read one another’s work and vote for the strongest of their own.

Every student → one per group Round complete

Round two

Within the class

Each group’s finalist goes to the whole class — different animals side by side, with groups free to pitch theirs together. One proposal carries the class.

One per group → one per class Round complete

Round three

The whole fifth grade

The three class finalists go up in the hallway, and all three fifth-grade classes vote. Whatever wins — animal and name together — is what moves in.

Three finalists → one class pet Round complete

One thing worth saying plainly: the quarter-one grade is the writing. Not the winning animal, not the winning name. A student can lose all three rounds and still have turned in the best piece of work in the grade, and their report card will say so.

Final outcomes 07

This is the part we fill in together, after round three. Print it, tape it to the refrigerator, and let your child write in the answers.

The animal chosen to be decided by the fifth grade

The name chosen to be decided by the fifth grade

The day it moved in

What helps at home 08

Ask which animal they were assigned, and then let them talk. You will hear quite a lot about whether it was the one they wanted.
Please don’t look anything up for them. I know how tempting it is, and I am asking anyway. A fast answer from a phone quietly takes away the work this project is made of.
Send the question back to school. “That sounds like one for Mrs. Gomez” is the single most helpful sentence you can say this quarter.
Ask them what they’d name it and why. The name is the one part of this that is entirely theirs, and they have to be able to defend it. A dinner-table dry run is excellent practice.
Watch for the break-coverage form. Part of every report is a plan for who cares for the animal during school breaks. If your family might be willing to host or stop in, your child will be very glad to have that to argue with.

Whichever animal moves in, every student in the fifth grade will have spent a quarter building a case for something they didn’t get to choose, out of evidence they found themselves, in writing they were proud enough to sign. That is the part I am really after. The pet is how we get there.

Sheena Gomez Fifth Grade · Writing & Grammar

This guide lives online at www.classpetproject.com — bookmark it and check the tracker as the quarter goes.