Welcome to Mrs. Busekrus' Fifth Grade Class

Hi! My name is Malia Busekrus (BOO-Z-CRUISE). I will be your child’s 5th Grade teacher for Religion, English & Science. This is my tenth year at STM; I’ve also taught 5th, 6th, and 3rd grade in Hawaii for 10 years prior to moving to Virginia. In addition, I homeschooled my children for several years. I grew up always wanting to be a teacher. BUT..., if I wasn’t a teacher, I would either be in business management or running an event planning company :).

My greatest joys are being married and having a large family. My husband (30 years of marriage!) and I have six children: four graduates from George Mason ; one currently at James Madison University; one in high school at Trinity School at Meadow View.

In order to make school a joyful environment, I am a huge proponent of freedom and fun in the classroom.
We use daily five for reading which allows the students freedom to choose what they want to work on first for the day and it breaks it up so that they are not just sitting at a desk reading a textbook and doing a worksheet. Fun is built into lessons throughout the day. One of the things we do in fifth grade is classroom economy which builds our classroom as a mini society where students get paid and charged for life in the classroom just as we do in real life. I love it and it’s a fun way to learn about the facts of life.

Enhancing our spiritual life is very important to me. We start the morning with prayer, students memorize prayers and all the Books of the Bible as well as study the Saints, and we go to Mass every week as a school.
My goal as a teacher in a Catholic school is to help my students to grow in oneness with the Lord, with each other and to experience the best aspects of education.

I think it's important to keep the traditional parts of education that have worked overtime such as cursive, homework, high expectations, producing quality work… While also adopting and adapting to new and proven ways of education such as using textbooks less and real books more, and having technology integrated into our curriculum.

I am thrilled to be here and I look forward to getting to know you and your children!