Adverbs are the "-ly" words that describe a verb. They lend themselves well to a class activity that allows students to hone their acting skills with a game of charades. Make a stack of cards, each with an adverb written on it. Let each student choose a card and have him perform an act in the way depicted on the card while other students call out adverbs trying to guess the right one. The winner gets to pick the next card.
Fifth grade students are old enough to be exposed to a wide variety of types of speech. How they speak to their peers is different from how they talk to their parents or their teacher or principal. Help your students become word anthropologists, analyzing their speech by collecting words and their meanings in a word journal. Also, assign different types of oral presentation of work throughout the year. One idea for an oral lesson is to have pairs of students sit back to back. One student holds a picture from a magazine and gives oral directions to the other for drawing the picture that they see.
A nature journal is a record of a student's reactions and impressions of the natural world around them. This is an especially poignant project for students in urban areas who may not spend a lot of time considering that nature is all around them just like it is for students in rural areas. Have students draw pictures of and write about nature in their journals. This is a good way to develop skills in descriptive writing. Assign research projects based on what they put into their journals, as well.
Students in the fifth grade have several years' experience learning by listening to what a teacher has to say. Turn the tables by having each student choose something that they know how to do and then give a demonstration and instructions to the class on how to perform the task. This project helps students with sequencing, oral presentation, using clear language and planning as students work to fit their lesson into a prescribed amount of time.