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 read a text and then they will demonstrate their new vocabulary knowledge through appropriate use of the words in context and with accompanying illustrations. They will create of an ABC book through individual and small-group activities. Students will take an active role in their learning by identifying the content area vocabulary they want to research. This lesson can be implemented in any content classroom.

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.

This video clip is meant to serve as a writing or discussion prompt during a unit on forces and motion. This can be used at varied grade levels, with the expectation that student responses would be more complex in higher grade levels.

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 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 activity, students will work in collaborative groups to create 9M x 9M models of plant and animal cells. Class population can be split into 2 or 4 groups, with half the students constructing animal cells and the other half constructing plant cells. Students must organize and assign duties, provide materials for this activity, and write a written report. They will also give "Cell Tours" to other students and/or classroom guests.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For this lesson, students are invited to attend a 19th Century party as a character from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. To play this role, students must understand the values and customs Dickens' characters represented in Victorian society. This lesson is divided into three stages: Group Investigative Roles, Individual Characterizations, and Individual Presentations. Students collaboratively research the life and times of Charles Dickens as it relates to a character, and write and present a first-person character analysis.

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.

Birth of a Colony explores the history of North Carolina from the time of European exploration through the Tuscarora War. Presented in five acts, the video combines primary sources and expert commentary to bring this period of our history to life. The opening segment describes the forces that motivated European exploration and colonization of the New World. Explorers and colonists encountered native peoples with agricultural lifestyles, strong communities, and respect for the land. These Indian communities saw themselves as part of nature, and they lived in harmony with the natural world. Their spiritual practices, such as the Green Corn Ceremony, reflected this worldview. The Europeans came to the New World primarily in search of land and riches. With two such different cultural viewpoints, clashes were inevitable. This teacher's guide includes a strictly social studies lesson and a complementary ELA lesson (writing assignment).

In this secondary source lesson on ancient Greek civilization, students will explore this story through text dependent questions, academic vocabulary, and writing assignments.

This lesson provides an introduction to the use of factual information in creative writing. Students first examine texts to identify how a published author incorporates facts in fiction writing by reading and questioning the books Diary of a Worm, Diary of a Spider, and Diary of a Fly (Cronin). After conducting inquiry on their own to gather facts on a topic decided upon by the class, students use their facts to write several diary entries collaboratively, entries which will contribute to a class book modeled on the mentor texts. Finally, students peer review each other’s work, and revise and edit their own writing before using the Multigenre Mapper interactive to publish their work.