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.

This unit addresses four 6th grade reading standards taught throughout the course of a trimester. These lessons are designed to be taught one day a week, while the other days in the trimester are focused on writing units. This unit is designed to be co-taught with a general education and special education teacher, but can be easily adapted if only one teacher is present.

In this activity, students will complete a close reading of the Gettysburg address by using the strategy called SOAPSTONE.

In this activity, students will examine examples of laws from Hammurabi's Code from the ancient Babylonian civilization. In small groups, they will determine what those laws tell them about the ancient civilization.

The Adventurers of Sojourner presents a third-person narrative account of the Mars Pathfinder mission, which included the deployment of a small science rover named Sojourner. In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

A nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage with textual analysis questions about main idea and textual support.

In this lesson plan, the traditional autobiography writing project is given a twist as students write alphabiographies—recording an event, person, object, or feeling associated with each letter of the alphabet. Students are introduced to the idea of the alphabiography through passages from James Howe's Totally Joe. Students then work with the teacher to create guidelines for writing their own alphabiographies. Students create an entry for each letter of the alphabet, writing about an important event from their lives. After the entry for each letter, students sum up the stories and vignettes by recording the life lessons they learned from the events. Since this type of autobiography breaks out of chronological order, students can choose what has been important in their lives. And since the writing pieces are short, even reluctant writers are eager to write!

In 1937, pilot Amelia Earhart planned to be the first to succeed in a dangerous flight. However, her journey was plagued with many obstacles, and controversy continues to surround the theories that attempt to explain her mysterious disappearance. In this CCSS lesson students will explore her life through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments. Included are sample writing tasks.

This lesson was designed to help students gain social studies/history content knowledge by using textual evidence to answer text-dependent questions.In this CCSS lesson, students will explore this history through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

In this lesson, students will work with the Elements of Myth graphic organizer and the Theme graphic organizer in order to help them analyze a model mini-essay in which the author describes elements of mythology in the myth of Cronus.

After reading haikus and examining the haiku format in this lesson, students write their own haikus that they then animate using Animoto.

In this 14 day unit plan students read, research, draw conclusions, and write beginning level argumentative essays comparing/contrasting major world religions.

Students will: compare and contrast the city-states, Athens and Sparta, using a Venn diagram. compose an essay including the similarities and differences between the city-states, Athens and Sparta.

Students use Shakespeare's Secret, a featured title on the Teachers' Choices Booklist (International Reading Association, 2006), as a springboard to exploration of the controversy regarding the authorship Shakespeare's works. The novel makes liberal use of the historical details surrounding William Shakespeare's life, and exposes students to the possibility raised by some theorists that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the works that have long been attributed to the Bard. Students explore the historical references in the novel and generate questions for further research. As they research these questions on suggested websites, they organize their findings with the help of the ReadWriteThink Notetaker. Then they work in small groups to create and present short dramatic skits that creatively connect the novel with the historical facts.

This resource is a nonfiction, Common Core aligned reading passage with textual analysis questions about main idea and textual support.

In this lesson, students will consider the strategies Ida B. Wells deployed to raise awareness of social problems and weigh the effectiveness of nonconformity to address a specific audience. Students will use Wells' story to write about a personal experience of conformity or non-conformity.

In this lesson, students will understand excerpts from an autobiographical work and retell scenes from the book. They will also collaborate to convert segments of the text into dialogue, creating a brief play about Susie King Taylor's involvement in the Civil War.

Beneath Blue Waters comes from the trade book with the same title, focuses on the layers of the ocean, and takes students to the deepest zone in a three crew member, submersible called Alvin. In this CCSS lesson students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

Students will determine the best way to govern by analyzing the writings of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists and apply their ideas during a Socratic Seminar.