This resource accompanies our Rethink 6th Grade ELA course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 6th grade English Language Arts content.

Students will learn the components of a Narrative writing. Through mini-lessons (Ex: dialogue, story elements, figurative language, good introductions,genre study,  etc.),  daily writing and revising, students will go through the writing process to produce a narrative writing on a topic of their choice.

In Ray Bradbury's “All Summer in A Day” takes place on the planet Venus in a future world where people have come to set up a civilization. In this CCSS lesson students will explore this fiction story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students will read like a writer and analyze figurative language and the author’s word choice, meaning, and tone in Chapter 3 of Bud, Not Buddy.

I have used this project as a summative assessment at the end of the school year for many years across two grade levels (6th and 8th). It has taken multiple formats as my students choose the medium that they utilize.

The purpose of this project is two-fold: first, to encourage students to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to help students appreciate particular literary devices in their functions as semaphores or interpretive signals. Those devices that are about the imagery of a poem (metaphor, simile, personification, description) can be thought of as magnifying glasses: we see most clearly that upon which the poet focuses our gaze. Similarly, those poetic devices that are about the sound of the poem (alliteration, consonance, enjambment, onomatopoeia, and repetition) can be thought of as volume buttons or amplifiers: we hear most clearly what the poet makes us listen to most attentively.

In designing a lesson to promote effective word choice in students' writing, the object is to start with something familiar. In this lesson, students start by discussing the associations they feel for car names from the 60s and 70s and analyze why those names were chosen. They then work in small groups on one of several possible activities, each exploring connotation in the context of car names.

This story, set in 1820s Austria, is a series of letters written between a young boy, Christoph, who lives in Vienna and his uncle, a music student who lives in Salzburg. In the letters, Christoph tells his uncle of the strange gentleman, Ludwig van Beethoven, who has rented a room in the boy’s home. In this CCSS lesson students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Ruri, a young Japanese girl, and her family are taken to an internment camp during WWII because the US government was afraid Japanese Americans would ally with Japan. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, student use figurative language techniques to create and comprehend meaning; for example, similes, metaphors, analogies, anecdotes, and sensory language.

In this lesson, students will use close reading strategies in order to understand the flow of the text and get the gist of the monologue "Hugo, the Lord's Nephew."

In this lesson, students will read the monologue "Taggot, the Blacksmith's Daughter," closely four times, each for a different purpose.

In this lesson, students will compare figurative language with literal language in order to examine how an author uses different figures of speech to help convey messages or express themes in interesting/dramatic ways.

This lesson uses creatures created from students' imaginations to teach hyperbole, simile, metaphor, and alliteration in association with creative writing.

Studying the influence of mass media on our lives allows students to view advertising in a new light. This lesson provides students with the opportunity to look at mass media in a critical way. Students become aware of the tremendous amount of advertising that they are exposed to on a daily basis. By looking at advertising critically, students begin to understand how the media oppresses certain groups, convinces people to purchase certain products, and influences culture.

This is a follow-up lesson that reviews the definitions of denotation and connotation and offers students an opportunity to choose the best word to achieve a specific tone.

This interactive unit encourages students to evaluate the effect of the inclusion of figurative langauge in Amy Tan's nonfiction narrative essay Fish Cheeks paired with the poem Face It by Janet Wong. This lesson will assist students in understanding the power of language. Students will be compelled to write by the conclusion of this lesson.

"The Dog of Pompeii" centers on a blind boy, Tito, and his dog, Bimbo, his life-long devoted companion during A.D. 79 in the city of Pompeii. Bimbo is crucial to Tito’s survival because and during the course of the story, a volcano erupts and causes mass panic and death. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

As a way to support teachers with English Language Arts (ELA) instruction during the pandemic, the NCDPI ELA team created choice boards featuring standards-aligned ELA activities.The intended purpose of these choice boards is to provide a way for students to continue standards-based learning while schools are closed. Each activity can be adapted and modified to be completed with or without the use of digital tools. Many activities can also be repeated with different texts. These standards-based activities are meant to be a low-stress approach to reinforcing and enriching the skills learned during the 2019-2020 school year. The choice boards are to be used flexibly by teachers, parents, and students in order to meet the unique needs of each learner.Exploration activities are provided for a more self-directed or guided approach to independent learning for students. These activities and sites should be used as a way to explore concepts, topics, skills, and social and emotional competencies that interest the learner.