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.

This teacher's guide for Addie on the Inside by James Howe contains discussion questions, activities, and research assignments.

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.

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 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 this lesson, students will have an opportunity to analyze their assessment of plot development in Flush.

In this lesson, students will work in pairs to find the gist and then analyze an excerpt of Dragonwings for point of view, figurative language, tone, and meaning.

In this lesson, students build on skills of citing in order to analyze what is being expressed and make inferences from two texts, Blue Lipstick and Technically, It's Not my Fault.

In this lesson, students recognize the cultural contributions of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and drama. They will read and analyze a myth and then create a puppet skit to demonstrate the myth.

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

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.

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 lesson, students read Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", then research the assassination of another historical figure.

What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.

This lesson prepares students to be independent and responsible for their own just-right book selections during independent reading time. Using the BOOKMATCH poster, the teacher introduces various criteria that influence book selection, such as length, language, topic, and genre. Students select books for independent reading using several of these criteria. In subsequent lessons, they discuss and evaluate their book choices and are introduced to additional selection criteria. Ongoing support and practice lead to increased awareness of their personal preferences as readers.

The short story, titled “Becky and the Wheel-and-Brake Boys,” is about how Becky desperately wants to own a bike despite the resistance she is met with from her mother and Granny-Liz. In this CCSS lesson students will explore this short story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

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 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.