📚 6th grade English Language Arts: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 👁️Point of View

   Telling first person, third person limited and third person omniscient apart, and thinking about what each narrator can and can't know.

2. 🎭Connotation & Tone

   Words can share a dictionary meaning (denotation) but carry different feelings (connotation), like “cozy” and “cramped.” Students choose words for effect and identify a writer's tone.

3. 📣Make Your Case

   Building an argument: stating a claim, choosing the strongest evidence, recognizing counterarguments and rebuttals, spotting persuasive techniques and ordering a persuasive paragraph.

4. 🤝Agreement

   Making verbs agree with their subjects (even with tricky phrases, “each,” “everyone” and “either…or”) and choosing pronouns that clearly match the nouns they replace.

5. 🔧Sentence Repair

   Spotting sentence fragments, run-on sentences and comma splices, and choosing correct ways to fix them with periods, semicolons, joining words or dependent clauses.

6. 🧩Commas & Clauses

   Finding dependent clauses, telling simple, compound and complex sentences apart, and using commas in lists, compound sentences, introductions and appositives.

7. 🌱Roots & Analogies

   Using Greek and Latin roots (like “geo,” “aud” and “port”) to work out unfamiliar words, and completing analogies that compare word relationships.

8. ✒️Punctuation Power

   Using a colon in a formal greeting or after a speaker's name in a script, and putting a comma after words like However and phrases like For example.

9. 📑Text Forms & Features

   Recognizing problem-and-solution reports, scripts, and web features like menus, and explaining how pictures and graphics add to a text.

10. 🧐Check the Source

    Children practice judging whether a source is credible and accurate, reading laterally, checking text and images made by technology such as chatbots, narrowing research questions and citing sources.

11. 🎬Media Techniques

    Children name persuasion techniques such as bandwagon, testimonials, fear and scarcity, notice camera angles, music and what is left out, and think about why people react to the same message differently.

12. 📝Spelling: Endings and Sound-Alikes

    Children practice US spelling: when to double a final consonant, -ance and -ence, -cious and -tious, words that break i before e, and commonly confused words such as their, there and they're.

13. 📝Plan & Organize Writing

    Practices choosing a focused topic for an audience, planning with organizers, using organization patterns such as cause and effect, and building introductions, paragraphs and conclusions.

14. 🎬Media, Bias & Diversity

    Practices how multimodal texts combine modes, how audience and purpose shape a text, and how to notice bias, stereotypes, inclusion and equity in texts.

15. ⚖️Judge and Compare Texts

    Your child uses clear criteria to judge texts, tells a summary from an evaluation, and compares texts across genres, cultures and eras, including how an author's place or background shapes their perspective.

16. 🔍Read Closely: Evidence, Theme and Change

    Your child picks the evidence that supports an inference, tells explicit from implied meaning, traces how a theme or central idea develops, writes objective summaries and follows how plots unfold, characters change and ideas are introduced and connected.

17. ✏️Stories, Responses and Evidence

    Your child chooses narrative techniques (openings, dialogue, pacing, transitions, sensory details, reflective endings), creative responses to texts, and evidence that supports analysis, reflection and research.