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.

This packet of 41 short selections can be used regularly over the course of a school year to help students build fluency. There are enough passages to work on one per week - to two weeks. This source provides a protocol outlining strategies to engage students in short, daily fluency practice. Teachers can also send passages home for additional practice. To access the packet, select "View File" to download.

This packet is designed to strengthen the components of reading fluency: accuracy, rate, and prosody (expression). Students should understand what they are reading, thus embedded supports, such as student glossaries and ‘right there’ comprehension questions, are included. However, these passages are not intended for close reading or deep comprehension work.

Note for teachers of English Language Learners (ELLs): Regular fluency practice is essential for helping ELLs improve their overall literacy skills. Those acquiring a second language benefit especially from additional support with decoding, pronunciation, word identification, and prosody—all of which are the focus of regular fluency practice. Activities found in the Achieve the Core Fluency Packet reflect several best practices for English Language Learner instruction including:
• Having a text read aloud by a fluent reader prior to the student engaging with the text.
• Giving students multiple opportunities to hear the text read aloud by a fluent reader so that they can mirror the pronunciation and prosody of well-spoken English.
• Providing repeated opportunities for students to practice decoding skills both on their own and with support via active monitoring.
• Providing opportunities for students to learn new vocabulary through the use of student-friendly definitions, and to reinforce newly learned vocabulary through repeated practice with the same text and opportunities to use that vocabulary to respond to comprehension questions.
• Calling out work with “juicy sentences,” a strategy developed by Dr. Lily Wong Fillmore, that allows students to look deeply at word choice, sentence structure, and other text features that build their understanding of how English is used to convey different meanings.
• Providing numbered lines that allow students to quickly focus-in on specific sections of the text.
• Providing space for students to annotate the text with their own notes.

In this activity, students watch the documentary Heaven Will Protect the Working Girlin sections, with documents and exercises designed to support and reinforce the film's key concepts: workers challenging the effects of industrial capitalism, the impact on immigrant families of young women earning money in the garment industry, and the methods used by women to improve working conditions in factories during the Progressive Era.

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.

In this lesson, students will independently apply the same reading strategies and skills they practiced in reading and analyzing the Steve Jobs speech.

In this middle school lesson from Teaching Tolerance, students will explore the calendar to determine why different religions celebrate different holidays and establish what factors school and government leaders should consider when deciding whether public schools should be closed for religious holidays. Students will work in groups to create solutions for school calendars that respect all students and beliefs.

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

An Anticipation Guide is a strategy that is used before reading to activate students' prior knowledge and build curiosity about a new topic. Before reading a selection, students respond to several statements that challenge or support their preconceived ideas about key concepts in the text. Using this strategy stimulates students' interest in a topic and sets a purpose for reading. Anticipation guides can be revisited after reading to evaluate how well students understood the material and to correct any misconceptions.

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

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.

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.

This lesson sets the stage for high-interest reading with a purpose through a biography project. Students work together to generate questions they would like to answer about several well-known people, then each student chooses one of these and finds information by reading a biography from the library and doing Internet research. Students create a graphic organizer (a web) to organize the facts they have found and share what they have learned about their subjects through oral presentations. Students evaluate themselves and their classmates by using a rubric during the research and graphic organizer-creation process and by giving written feedback on one another's presentations.