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 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 Students explore the historical references in the novel and generate questions for further research.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.

Students examine graphic novels and comic books and discuss the important components of the genre, such as captions, dialogue, and images. They then use an online tool to create a six-panel comic highlighting six key scenes in a book they have read. By creating comic strips or cartoon squares featuring characters in books, students are encouraged to think analytically about the characters, events, and themes they've explored in ways that expand their critical thinking by focusing on crystallizing the significant points of the book in a few short scenes.

In this lesson, students will select a piece of their own writing that contains dialogue then go through the piece highlighting the speech of each character in a different color. Then they will go through the piece again looking for and correcting "character clashes" that occur when two speakers are highlighted in the same paragraph.

The media has a huge effect on popular culture. Television programs underscore stereotypes of various groups of people.This lesson provides a platform in which students can critically analyze popular television programs. By looking at the media critically, students develop an awareness of the messages that are portrayed through the media.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Science created this resource as part of an online workshop series, but you are welcome to use or modify it for your classroom. It includes a video and written directions for creating nature journals and tips for incorporating them into your classroom. For information on taking any the Nature Neighborhood online workshops for CEUs or EE credit, visit: https://naturalsciences.org/learn/educators/online-workshops.

Students will be able to recognize characteristics of a personal narrative Students will recognize the traits of good writing and will write, revise, and publish a personal narrative.

Students work together in small groups to read, discuss, and analyze fairy tales. After compiling a list of common elements, students collaborate on their own original fairy tales—based on events from their own lives or the lives of someone they know. Each student decides what kind of experience to write about, composes and revises a fairy tale, and then presents their story to the rest of the class.

The students will be lead through the writing process of writing a memoir based on real events in their own life.

In this lesson students process feedback from the end of unit 2 assessment to help them set goals for their writing for the performance task and then begin drafting.

In this lesson, students use their Narrative Plan Parts I and II as a foundation for creating their draft.

In this poetry session, students learn that shapes don’t have to be silent, and poetry doesn’t have to be linear, as they write shapes in verse, and verse in shapes. This lesson bridges the gap between poetry and math!

Four to five person teams will research and present an in-depth TV news special about the Holocaust for the Passover Sedar holiday. Students will conduct research and assume a specific task of their news team to present a main story in a newscast/Podcast.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

What should a good narrative contain? For this lesson, a mystery, a type of narrative realistic fiction, will be composed. Since strong adjectives and adverbs will support a mystery, they will be incorporated into the writing.

While Paul Revere's ride is the most famous event of its kind in American history, other Americans made similar rides during the Revolutionary period. After learning about some less well known but no less colorful rides that occurred in other locations, students gather evidence to support an argument about why at least one of these "other riders" does or does not deserve to be better known.

In this video resource from PBS Learning Media, students will consider Mark Twain as the enormous "noticer" and explore the humor that Twain found in the ordinary details of life.

Students work with primary documents and latter-day photographs to recapture the experience of traveling on the Oregon Trail.