Work Text:
Every student at Shield Elementary School waited and waited to become a sixth-grader. Not only were they the oldest students, their twelve years of experience making them so mature and so wise, but they also had the best teachers. Every grade in Shield Elementary had incredible teachers but none were quite as prized as the ones in charge of the sixth grade. No matter which teacher a student got, they won. It was simply impossible to lose.
If they got Ms. Simmons then they had an actual ray of sunshine for a teacher. Her class was always doing some sort of experiment and every year they would observe the life cycle of butterflies and make oozing volcanoes. She also always incorporated an art project and a book into her lesson to show how connected learning was. She was the kindest teacher that could exist while also being someone that the students didn’t dare cross. No one ever wanted Ms. Simmons to be mad at them simply because they adored her too much to ever want to see the look of disappointment fall onto her face.
If a student got Mr. Fitz then they would get to race robots and he always did a traveling reader’s theater that his class would write after finishing their unit on space. He kept all the scripts too and Ms. Simmons had even given him a hard copy of the first one ever written, The Prince in the Stars. He was a very energetic teacher and had a marvelous gift of helping his students build their ideas and work out their problems. His students loved him because he seemed to care so much about his work and his students; plus his room was also one of the coolest in the buildings with spaceships designs and a giant gumball machine, which was always a bonus.
The third sixth-grade teacher was Ms. Johnson. She was hilarious and had the incredible ability to be able to make every last one of her students laugh. She was also highly empathetic and knew exactly how to be there for her students. And, her class was always outside. They read outside, played outside, had class outside sometimes. They also had an obstacle course day and kids in her class waited all year for code-cracking day, the day they had to use what they learned to find the key to a pizza party.
All three of the sixth-grade teachers were beloved by their students and adored by parents and each one had their own special style of teaching. Since the teachers were so loved, it was no wonder that some of the best times of the year were when all three of them taught together. The three teachers were close friends and got along swimmingly and so they often did many grade-wide activities such as the annual Shakespeare play and Read-a-thon. However, none were as looked forward to by students as Halloween in Space.
Every year, Ms. Simmons, Mr. Fitz, and Ms. Johnson took their classes to the planetarium the week of Halloween. The kids got to go in costume and the planetarium gave out free astronaut ice cream for the holiday. The teachers also always went as different space-themed things. Either they all went as planets or different galaxies and one year all three teachers went as space-themed outlaws, their costumes very post-apocalyptic and detailed with space dust and bandit names: Quake, The Marauder, and The Brain.
The students not only looked forward to seeing their teachers dress up but they also looked forward to the Halloween Space Race . As the students stood in the lobby of the planetarium, they got divided up randomly into teams with students coming from multiple classes all being on one team so as to get to know one another better. They got to pick a different Halloween creature to name their team after and the group also functioned as a sort of buddy system. The kids would get to fill out a learning-based scavenger hunt to “get to space” and it always resulted in kids eagerly reading each of the plaques around the exhibits so as to find the answers and win the race.
The kids would always leave the planetarium happily exhausted, many times munching away at their freeze-dried ice cream with smiles plastered on their faces. There was nothing better than being a student of Ms. Simmons, Mr. Fitz, and Ms. Johnson.