- English Language Arts and Reading
- Grade 6
- Response skills
respond orally or in writing with appropriate register, vocabulary, tone, and voice; and
A student expectation is directly related to the knowledge and skills statement, is more specific about how students demonstrate their learning, and always begins with a verb. Student expectations are further broken down into their component parts, often referred to as “breakouts.”
Vertical alignment shows student expectations in the same subject area at different grade levels that are related to or build upon one another.
respond orally or in writing with appropriate register, vocabulary, tone, and voice; and
respond orally or in writing with appropriate register, vocabulary, tone, and voice; and
respond orally or in writing with appropriate register, vocabulary, tone, and voice;
Breakouts are the component parts that make up a student expectation. A breakout shows a distinct concept a student should know or a distinct skill that a student should be able to demonstrate.
Students develop and sustain oral and written language skills to communicate their ideas effectively using appropriate language conventions. Students consider audience and purpose while applying appropriate genre characteristics and craft and determining the appropriate mode of delivery.
listen actively to interpret a message, ask clarifying questions, and respond appropriately;
follow and give oral instructions that include multiple action steps;
give an organized presentation with a specific stance and position, employing eye contact, speaking rate, volume, enunciation, natural gestures, and conventions of language to communicate ideas effectively; and
determine the meaning and usage of grade-level academic English words derived from Greek and Latin roots such as mis/mit, bene, man, vac, scrib/script, and jur/jus.
describe personal connections to a variety of sources, including self-selected texts;
write responses that demonstrate understanding of texts, including comparing sources within and across genres;
use text evidence to support an appropriate response;
paraphrase and summarize texts in ways that maintain meaning and logical order;
interact with sources in meaningful ways such as notetaking, annotating, freewriting, or illustrating;
respond using newly acquired vocabulary as appropriate;
discuss and write about the explicit or implicit meanings of text;
respond orally or in writing with appropriate register, vocabulary, tone, and voice; and
reflect on and adjust responses as new evidence is presented.
demonstrate knowledge of literary genres such as realistic fiction, adventure stories, historical fiction, mysteries, humor, and myths;
analyze the effect of meter and structural elements such as line breaks in poems across a variety of poetic forms;
analyze how playwrights develop characters through dialogue and staging;
the controlling idea or thesis with supporting evidence;
features such as introduction, foreword, preface, references, or acknowledgements to gain background information; and
organizational patterns such as definition, classification, advantage, and disadvantage;
identifying the claim;
explaining how the author uses various types of evidence to support the argument;
identifying the intended audience or reader; and
analyze characteristics of multimodal and digital texts.
explain the author's purpose and message within a text;
analyze how the use of text structure contributes to the author's purpose;
analyze the author's use of print and graphic features to achieve specific purposes;
describe how the author's use of figurative language such as metaphor and personification achieves specific purposes;
identify the use of literary devices, including omniscient and limited point of view, to achieve a specific purpose;
analyze how the author's use of language contributes to mood and voice; and
explain the differences between rhetorical devices and logical fallacies.
plan a first draft by selecting a genre appropriate for a particular topic, purpose, and audience using a range of strategies such as discussion, background reading, and personal interests;
organizing with purposeful structure, including an introduction, transitions, coherence within and across paragraphs, and a conclusion; and
developing an engaging idea reflecting depth of thought with specific facts and details;
revise drafts for clarity, development, organization, style, word choice, and sentence variety;
complete complex sentences with subject-verb agreement and avoidance of splices, run-ons, and fragments;
consistent, appropriate use of verb tenses;
conjunctive adverbs;
prepositions and prepositional phrases and their influence on subject-verb agreement;
pronouns, including relative;
subordinating conjunctions to form complex sentences and correlative conjunctions such as either/or and neither/nor;
capitalization of proper nouns, including abbreviations, initials, acronyms, and organizations;
punctuation marks, including commas in complex sentences, transitions, and introductory elements; and
correct spelling, including commonly confused terms such as its/it's, affect/effect, there/their/they're, and to/two/too; and
publish written work for appropriate audiences.
compose literary texts such as personal narratives, fiction, and poetry using genre characteristics and craft;
compose informational texts, including multi-paragraph essays that convey information about a topic, using a clear controlling idea or thesis statement and genre characteristics and craft;
compose multi-paragraph argumentative texts using genre characteristics and craft; and
compose correspondence that reflects an opinion, registers a complaint, or requests information in a business or friendly structure.
generate student-selected and teacher-guided questions for formal and informal inquiry;
develop and revise a plan;
identify and gather relevant information from a variety of sources;
differentiate between primary and secondary sources;
synthesize information from a variety of sources;
differentiate between paraphrasing and plagiarism when using source materials;
display academic citations and use source materials ethically; and
use an appropriate mode of delivery, whether written, oral, or multimodal, to present results.