6th Grade
A full middle school launch, ratios and the number system in math, reading and reasoned writing in ELA, Earth and space science, and the ancient world from Mesopotamia to Rome. Sixth graders get the older interface: they type their answers, Clara asks harder questions, and the work starts looking like scholarship.
Start 30 days freeFive days from the opening week of 6th grade, taken from the lessons themselves rather than written to sound good.
The week opens with ratio language before ratio notation: a picture of four red counters and two blue ones, described three different ways, as a difference ('2 more red'), as a comparison ('twice as many red'), and finally as a ratio ('4 red for every 2 blue'), so your child hears all three before choosing which one a ratio actually is.
ELA opens with a short passage read aloud, your child summing it up in one sentence, then sorting details into two piles: what the passage says outright and what has to be figured out, the seed of the whole unit's work on inference.
Science's first day is deliberately quiet: a short animation of a blinking light on screen, and the only question is what everyone already believes explains it, no mechanism taught yet, just a fair look at where your child's thinking starts.
Social studies opens at a gallery station: reading a real map key ('what color shows water?'), then looking at a photo of an artifact and asking the harder question, what can this NOT tell us, before the unit gets to what actually makes a civilization.
Sixth grade also switches how your child answers: typed reasoning instead of tapped choices, across every subject, all week, because that's the shift this course makes at the exact point kids are ready for it.
This is the year your child learns to think in ratios instead of just counting differences — "for every 3 of these, 2 of those" instead of "3 more of these." That one idea (a multiplicative relationship between two quantities) gets used all year: to divide fractions, to make sense of negative numbers, to write algebra expressions, to compute area and volume, and finally to describe a set of data. By June they should be comfortable with signed numbers, one-step equations, decimals in all four operations, basic area/volume/surface area, and describing a data set with center and spread — not as nine separate topics, but as one idea applied nine times.
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.
This is a full year of Earth science that keeps circling back to one idea: a small handful of causes — gravity, heat moving around, matter cycling through different forms — explain almost everything Earth does, from why the moon looks different each night to why hurricanes and earthquakes happen where they do. Your child starts by watching patterns in the sky, then works down into rock and inside the Earth, then out into water and weather, and finishes by using all of it to think about real disasters and real human choices. Every hands-on activity uses stuff you already have in the kitchen or garage. By June they should be able to look at almost any Earth event on the news and explain, in their own words, what's actually causing it.
This is a year-long tour of the ancient world — early farmers, then Mesopotamia, Egypt and Kush, India, China, Greece, and Rome — ending with Rome's fall. Your child learns why cities and kings and laws showed up where and when they did, not just names and dates. Along the way they practice reading old documents skeptically (who wrote this, and why should I believe them?), reading maps and timelines, and writing short arguments backed by evidence. Every religion or belief system in the course is studied the way a historian studies it — what people believed and how it shaped their laws and daily life — never as something to practice or adopt.
Every course above is published in full, every unit, every module, every objective, and you can try a real lesson without an account.
The pedagogy grows up with the student. Questions run longer, answer choices demand finer distinctions, Clara stops offering tap-to-answer and expects typed reasoning, and the courses begin asking "how do we know?", the historian’s and scientist’s question, on purpose.
Ratios, proportional thinking and the number system, the standard 6th grade year that pre-algebra is later built on. The sequence here runs 6th grade math → 7th grade proportional reasoning → Pre-Algebra in 8th → Algebra I, with mastery pacing across all of it.