Grade 6 · Christian · NGSS/CCSS-aligned
This is a full year of 6th grade reading and writing built entirely on free material — old public-domain stories, folktales, speeches, and open nonfiction, so you won't be buying a textbook or novel set. The whole year trains one core habit: don't just tell me what you think a text means, show me the exact line that proves it. From that habit, your child learns to tell the difference between what a story is about (topic) and what it's actually saying (theme), to read figurative language as a choice the author made on purpose, to compare two accounts of the same event, and to write three kinds of essays — argument, informative, and story — each one reusing skills from the reading units instead of starting from scratch.
The whole year, in plain English. Tap any unit to see every skill inside, nothing is hidden.
This is the foundation for everything else this year: proving a point about a text with an exact quote instead of a retelling in your own words. Your child already knows how to summarize a story from 5th grade — this unit adds the harder move of picking the one line that actually proves a specific claim, and explaining why a tempting-but-wrong quote falls short.
Distinguish an explicitly stated detail from an inferred detail in a short narrative or informational passage.
State a specific, arguable claim about a passage rather than a general restatement of its content.
Quote text exactly, using correct quotation marks, to support a stated claim about a narrative passage.
Select the strongest of two plausible quotations to support a given claim about an informational passage, and explain the choice in writing.
Explain why a plausible-sounding quotation fails to support a specific claim as well as a stronger alternative.
Determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word in a passage using context clues, to support accurate claim-making.
Justify, in a class discussion, which of two classmates' evidence choices better fits a shared claim, citing the passage.
Apply the claim-quote-justify routine to an entirely unseen passage and topic not used anywhere in instruction.
Generalize the claim-evidence standard to a brand-new domain, such as evaluating a real-world claim outside of a literary or informational passage (e.g., an advertisement).
Theme is not a word like 'courage' — it's a full sentence claiming something about life or people, and your child has to earn it by tracking what a character chose and what happened because of that choice. This unit spends real time on fables with a stated moral first (so there's an answer key to check against), then moves to stories with no moral stated at all.
Given a short text, state its topic as a one-word or short-phrase label.
Distinguish a full-sentence theme statement from a one-word topic label, given both for the same text.
Track a character's key choice and its consequence across a fable's plot using a graphic organizer.
Infer a full-sentence theme statement from a character's tracked choices and consequences in a new fable.
Defend a theme statement for a short story by citing two specific pieces of textual evidence.
Compare two readers' differing theme statements for the same short story and evaluate whether each is evidence-backed.
Generate and defend a full-sentence theme statement for a previously unseen fable with no explicit stated moral.
Apply the theme-vs-topic distinction to a text type not used anywhere in this unit's instruction (e.g., a song lyric or short informational narrative).
This unit takes the 'read between the lines' skill from Unit 2 and applies it at the level of a single word or phrase. Your child learns that when a writer says something that isn't literally true — 'her voice was a knife' — that's not a mistake, it's the only way to say that particular thing. They'll work through simile, metaphor, personification, connotation versus denotation, and allusion.
Distinguish a simile or metaphor from a literal statement by identifying the two things being compared.
Explain what a specific metaphor or simile means by naming both terms of the comparison and the shared quality that connects them.
Explain how a personification example shapes the tone of a passage differently than a literal description of the same event would.
Classify a set of words with similar denotation but differing connotation as positive, negative, or neutral in the way they describe a person.
Predict how replacing a connotatively loaded word with its neutral synonym changes a reader's impression of a character in a new passage.
Identify an allusion in an unfamiliar text and infer what shared knowledge the writer expects the reader to bring to it.
Explain, using an exact quoted phrase, why no literal wording could convey the same specific meaning as a figurative line, not merely what a literal restatement would lose.
Annotate an unseen poem and an unseen short story excerpt to locate at least four distinct figurative devices, across genres the student has not analyzed together before.
Justify, when two readers disagree about which device is present in a borderline line, which reading better fits the surrounding context.
This is where reading turns into writing: a claim, reasons that back it, evidence that fits each reason specifically, and a counterclaim that gets named and then knocked down rather than ignored. Each piece is taught alone first — what's a reason versus evidence, how do you order reasons, what does a real rebuttal sound like — before they're combined into a full essay.
Given a short passage, state a one-sentence claim that takes a position rather than summarizes the passage.
Sort a mixed set of sentences into 'reason' (general support) and 'evidence' (specific textual detail) categories, justifying boundary cases.
Given a reason and three candidate quotes from a passage, select the quote that best fits that specific reason and explain the connection in one sentence.
Order three reasons from strongest to weakest for a given claim and justify the ordering in writing.
Explain why acknowledging a counterclaim before rebutting it strengthens an argument more than ignoring the opposing view.
Write a rebuttal sentence that responds to the specific point of a stated counterclaim rather than restating the original claim.
Select transition words that signal the correct structural relationship (adding a reason, introducing a counterclaim, or rebutting) in a partially-drafted essay.
Given a new short informational passage never discussed in class, draft a complete 5-6 paragraph argument essay with claim, ordered reasons, fitted evidence, and a rebutted counterclaim.
Given a claim-reason-evidence structure from a different genre (e.g., a persuasive letter about a school policy, not a text-based essay), identify which parts are present, missing, or misused.
Now your child compares two texts on the same topic — typically a myth and a nonfiction piece about a related natural event — and has to say what a reader learns only by reading both, not either one alone. This unit also tackles a specific bad habit directly: assuming nonfiction automatically beats a myth just because of its genre label.
Given two texts on the same topic, students distinguish a detail present in only one text from a detail present in both.
Students state the topic and a defensible theme for a myth, using a complete sentence beginning 'this text suggests that...'
Given a myth and an informational text on the same phenomenon, students explain why the author of each included or omitted a specific detail, citing each text.
Students synthesize two texts' accounts of the same event into one statement describing what a reader learns only from reading both, not from either alone.
Students judge which of two disagreeing accounts to trust more on a specific point, justifying the judgment by each text's likely purpose and audience rather than by genre label alone.
Given an unfamiliar third text on a topic already compared, students infer what new information a reader gains by adding this third account.
Students recall the definition of theme, topic, and cited evidence when prompted at the start of a lesson.
Students organize a completed comparison chart's rows into a single paragraph that names both texts in every body sentence.
This unit combines the comparing skill from Unit 5 with the claim/evidence vocabulary from Unit 4 to build a longer essay drawing on two sources. The big idea: the structure of an informative essay — cause-effect, compare-contrast, or by category — is a decision that has to match the topic, not a template slapped onto anything.
Given a topic and its content, classify which organizational structure (cause-effect, compare-contrast, categorical) best fits it, and explain why.
Recall the definition of plagiarism and the difference between a direct quotation and a paraphrase.
Execute a paraphrase of a source sentence that preserves its meaning while changing its wording and sentence structure sufficiently to avoid plagiarism.
Given two source excerpts on one topic, infer which organizational structure would let a writer present both sources' information most clearly.
Produce a topic sentence for a body paragraph that previews the structure the paragraph will use (e.g., signals a cause, a category, or a point of comparison).
Compare a draft paragraph reorganized under two different structures and explain how each version changes what a reader would understand as most important.
Implement source integration (quoting or paraphrasing, with attribution) across a full multi-paragraph draft built from two provided sources.
Plan an informative essay's structure (headings, section order, transitions) before drafting, matching the plan to the topic's content and two given sources.
Given a new topic and two unfamiliar sources never discussed in class, generate a complete informative essay with a structure the student justifies as the best fit for that topic.
Your child writes an original short story (750-1000 words) this unit, controlling two tools on purpose: dialogue punctuation and pacing — the choice to slow down and show a moment in detail (scene) versus speed through it in a sentence or two (summary). They also work on showing a character trait through action instead of just stating it.
Given a mentor paragraph with dialogue, students correctly identify where each new line break belongs and why, checking every speaker change.
Using the exact Version A/Version B moment pair shown in Day 4-5 instruction, students label each version 'scene' or 'summary' and point to the specific clue (time covered vs. space used) that was named in class.
Students distinguish a scene-version and a summary-version of a NEW, unseen story moment by identifying how much story-clock time each version covers versus how much page space it uses.
Students explain why a specific pacing shift (scene to summary or summary to scene) in a mentor text changes the reader's experience of the story's events.
Students compare a stated-trait sentence and a shown-trait passage conveying the same character trait, and infer what information each gives the reader.
Students plan an original short narrative that includes at least one dialogue exchange and one deliberate pacing shift, organizing story beats onto a timeline before drafting.
Students draft an original scene using sensory and figurative detail (metaphor, simile, personification from Unit 3) to build a moment treated as scene rather than summary.
Students revise a drafted narrative passage by converting at least one stated character trait into a shown trait and adjusting one pacing choice, without altering the plot.
Students generalize the scene/summary and showing/telling distinctions to explain a pacing or characterization choice in a previously unseen published narrative excerpt.
Students state what their own completed narrative is 'really about' beneath its plot, distinguishing this from a one- or two-word topic.
Nothing new gets taught here. This is 26 days near the end of the year checking whether everything from Units 1-7 actually stuck once it's no longer fresh — evidence citation, theme vs. topic, figurative language, comparing two texts — without your child being told in advance which skill a given question is testing. It opens with a diagnostic, spends time only on whatever that diagnostic reveals is weak, and ends with a big final piece in a writing mode your child chooses themselves.
Given an unseen literary passage, the student selects the quotation that most strongly supports a given theme claim, from among quotations that are topically related but do not support the claim.
The student states a theme claim for an unseen short story and defends it by connecting at least two pieces of evidence to a stated line of reasoning.
The student explains what a specified metaphor or personification in the unseen passage means and why a literal reading would misread the author's intent.
Given two unseen informational texts on the same event with a different topic and genre pairing than Unit 5 used, the student writes a comparison paragraph identifying what each author included, omitted, or emphasized.
The student selects a writing mode (argument, informative, or narrative) for the final piece and states one reason the chosen structure fits the chosen purpose.
The student drafts a full piece in the chosen mode, incorporating a claim or controlling idea, organized evidence, and a structure appropriate to the mode.
The student revises a draft by applying at least one piece of task-specific feedback about evidence or structure, and identifies what changed and why.
In a brief oral presentation, the student justifies a specific revision choice by naming the evidence or structural problem it solved.
Given a new theme claim on an unseen passage, the student recalls the definition distinguishing theme from topic without prompting.
Given a claim about a text, the student classifies a supplied piece of evidence as strong support, weak/tangential support, or contradicting the claim.
From the parent guide
This is a full year of 6th grade reading and writing built entirely on free material — old public-domain stories, folktales, speeches, and open nonfiction, so you won't be buying a textbook or novel set. The whole year trains one core habit: don't just tell me what you think a text means, show me the exact line that proves it. From that habit, your child learns to tell the difference between what a story is about (topic) and what it's actually saying (theme), to read figurative language as a choice the author made on purpose, to compare two accounts of the same event, and to write three kinds of essays — argument, informative, and story — each one reusing skills from the reading units instead of starting from scratch.
Unit 1 · what to expect
This is the foundation for everything else this year: proving a point about a text with an exact quote instead of a retelling in your own words. Your child already knows how to summarize a story from 5th grade — this unit adds the harder move of picking the one line that actually proves a specific claim, and explaining why a tempting-but-wrong quote falls short.
The full guide covers all 8 units: where kids get stuck, what to say, and how to tell it's working. Included with the course.
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