Fifth Class English begins the study of literary forms, considering folk tales, short stories, ballads, sonnets, and plays. Work in composition continues to stress sentence variety, and begins to look at various strategic approaches to the paragraph. As in Sixth Class English, vocabulary exercises grow primarily out of the reading. Each student selects (or, in some cases, writes) and performs a dramatic monologue, and there is a traditional student-authored Fifth Class play in the spring, reflecting, sometimes with a small note of satire, on the doings of the First Class over the past year. Typical readings include A Raisin in the Sun and short stories from an anthology including Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Saki, Jack London, O. Henry, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Parker, Shirley Jackson, and Barbara Kingsolver.