6th Grade English Language Arts

Students will actively listen using agreed-upon discussion rules with awareness of verbal and nonverbal cues.

Students will actively listen and interpret a speaker’s verbal messages and ask questions to clarify the speaker’s purpose.

Students will work effectively and respectfully in diverse groups by sharing responsibility for collaborative work and recognizing individual contributions made by each group member.

Students will engage in collaborative discussions about what they are reading and writing, expressing their own ideas clearly in pairs, diverse groups, and whole-class settings.

Students will give formal and informal presentations in a group or individually, organizing information and determining content for the audience, speaking audibly and clearly in coherent sentences.

Students will correctly form words in print and cursive and use appropriate spacing for letters, words, and sentences.

Students will use correct spelling when writing unfamiliar and multisyllabic words, using their combined knowledge of letter-sound correspondences and all major syllable types (i.e., closed, consonant +le, open, vowel digraphs, vowel silent e, r-controlled).

Students will use structural analysis to correctly spell contractions, abbreviations, and common spelling rules related to adding prefixes and suffixes.

Students will expand their sight word vocabulary by reading regularly- and irregularly-spelled words in isolation and context with increasing automaticity.

Students will orally and accurately read grade-level text at a smooth rate with expression that connotes comprehension.

Students will determine the key details that support the main idea of a text.

Students will compare fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to distinguish various genres.

Students will summarize and sequence the important events of a story.

Students will summarize facts and details from an informational text.

Students will routinely use a recursive process to prewrite, organize, and develop narrative, informative, and opinion drafts that display evidence of paragraphing.

Students will routinely use a recursive process to revise content for clarity, coherence, and organization (e.g., logical order and transitions).

Students will routinely and recursively edit drafts for punctuation, capitalization, and correctly-spelled grade-level words, using resources as needed.

Students will routinely use a recursive process to publish final drafts for an authentic audience (e.g., reading aloud, posting on blog, displaying, entering contest).

Students will determine the author’s purpose (i.e., entertain, inform, persuade), and draw conclusions to determine if the author’s purpose was achieved.

Students will determine whether a grade-level literary text is narrated in first- or third-person point of view (limited and omniscient) and describe its effect.

Students will determine how literary elements contribute to the meaning of a literary text: setting, plot, characters (i.e., protagonist, antagonist), characterization, conflict, theme.

Students will determine how literary devices contribute to the meaning of a text: imagery, metaphor, idiom, personification, hyperbole, simile, alliteration, onomatopoeia.

Students will distinguish fact from opinion in an informational text and explain how reasons and facts support specific points.

Students will compose narratives reflecting real or imagined experiences that: include plots with a climax and resolution, developed characters who overcome conflicts and use dialogue, a consistent point of view, unfolding in chronological sequence, and using sentence variety, sensory details, and vivid language to create interest.

Students will compose informative essays that introduce and develop a topic, incorporate evidence (e.g., specific facts, examples), maintain an organized structure with transitional words and phrases, and use sentence variety and word choice to create interest.

Students will write opinion essays that introduce a topic and state a clear opinion, incorporate relevant, text-based evidence to support the opinion, use sentence variety and word choice to create interest, and organize writing in a logical sequence with transitional words and phrases.

Students will identify relationships among words, including synonyms, antonyms, analogies, homophones, and homographs.

Students will use context clues to clarify the meaning of words.

Students will use word parts (e.g., affixes, Latin roots, stems) to define and determine the meaning of new words.

Students will consult reference materials (e.g., dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses) to comprehend the words in a text.

Students will acquire new grade-level vocabulary, relate new words to prior knowledge, and apply vocabulary in various contexts.

Students will use grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate ideas.

Students will use precise and vivid vocabulary in writing for the intended mode and effect on the audience.

Students will recognize simple, compound, and complex sentences.

Students will recognize and explain the impact on meaning of parts of speech in sentences: nouns, verb tense to identify settings, times, sequences, and conditions, subject and verb agreement, adjectives, prepositional phrases, possessive pronouns and the nouns they replace (i.e., antecedents), coordinating conjunctions, comparative and superlative adverbs, interjections.

Students will compose simple, compound, and complex sentences.

Students will use nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, and pronouns to add clarity and variety to their writing.

Students will recognize and correct errors in subject and verb agreement.

Students will write using correct capitalization mechanics.

Students will write using correct end mark mechanics.

Students will write using correct apostrophe mechanics.

Students will use commas in greetings and closings in letters and emails, to separate individual words in a series, and to indicate dialogue.

Students will use a colon to introduce a list.

Students will use quotation marks to indicate dialogue, quoted material, and titles of works.

Students will use underlining or italics to indicate titles of works.

Students will use a semicolon to punctuate compound sentences.

Students will use their own viable research questions to gather information about a topic.

Students will record and organize information from various primary and secondary sources.

Students will determine the relevance and reliability of the information gathered.

Students will formulate a viable research question.

Students will organize information found during research, following a modified citation style (i.e., author, title, publication date).

Students will write informative texts independently for short timeframes (e.g., a single sitting or a day or two) that organize related information logically and convey key details, quotations, or other relevant information from multiple sources.

Students will locate and use information from a variety of alphabetic, aural, visual, spatial, and/or gestural content to compare perspectives about ideas and topics.

Students will communicate their ideas, thoughts, and feelings by combining two or more kinds of content: writing/alphabetic, sound, visual, and/or spatial, movement.

Students will select texts for academic and personal purposes and read independently for extended periods of time.

Students will write independently using a combination of emergent and conventional writing with prompting.