6th Grade ELA

Understand and use close reading strategies for understanding.

Use appropriate strategies, such as note-taking, re-reading, and summarizing to understand the theme and practice identifying the theme in a variety of texts including novels, plays, and poems.

Compare and contrast characters, settings, and events using specific details from the text.

Distinguish between literal and figurative speech.

Compare texts told from differing points of view, noticing how it changes your experience of a text (for example, a book narrated in first person usually seems much more personal and immediate than one told by a narrator).

Use evidence from the text to support claims about the text.

Distinguish between fact and opinion, as well as between important facts and unimportant (extraneous) details.

Understand the difference between theme and main idea (main idea is a concrete subject, while theme is usually something you can’t touch or see like “friendship or “justice”)

Select a focus, an organizational structure, and a point of view (perspective/position) based on purpose, genre expectations, audience, length, and format requirements 

Use traditional structures for conveying information (e.g., chronological order, cause and effect, similarity and differences, and posing and answering a question)

Understand the difference between fact and opinion as well as between key details and extraneous details.

Cite appropriately and avoid plagiarism.

Read a wide variety of texts, so that you will be exposed to all sorts of text structures (e.g. scientific texts with abstracts, methods procedures, plays with acts, scenes, novels with chapters, instructions with headings, etc.)

Read a wide variety of informational texts (newspapers, diaries, experimental logs, humorous essays, political speeches, etc.).

Use the TIME magazines, as well as MyOn or the public library, to learn about a variety of genres and sub-genres of text, including mystery, adventure, biography, science fiction, etc.

Choose an article from TIME Magazine. Practice summarizing the text without adding anything that isn't explicitly written in the text (like recommendations or opinions).

Choose a nonfiction text, such as an article from TIME Magazine, and complete the hashtag activity for the first few paragraphs to help you summarize key ideas.

Summarize a book that you read and enjoyed. Be sure to use concrete words and strong sensory details. Share your summary with a friend or family member. Does your summary entice that person to want to read the book? If not, revise your summary and try again!

Read the Article "Comic Craze" on pages 4 - 5 of TIME Magazine's March 27, 2020 issue. Then, choose two characters from a book you are currently reading. Tell the story from different points of view by rewriting the story from each character’s point of view in a comic strip. 

Use the character cards activity to practice characterization for a character in a book you are reading. 

Compare and contrast at least two books that you have recently read. 

Use the Compare and Contrast map to compare and contrast two characters from a story, the plot of two different books, or the settings from two different texts you read.

Consider keeping a notebook of texts read with notes.