Spur Language Arts 6

In this full-year sixth-grade course, students develop a mastery of reading, writing, and language arts skills. Students grow as readers and writers as they read critically, analyze texts, and cite evidence through a vast range of engaging literary and informational reading selections. Students explore a full unit on Lewis Carroll’s classic novel Through the Looking Glass and read essential parts of other fictional texts including Holes, Esperanza Rising, and The Number Devil. Students also evaluate poetry and drama, such as a poem by Langston Hughes and an excerpt from Brighton Beach Memoirs. In order to help students comprehend text structure, author’s purpose, and argumentative claims, the course delves into nonfiction, from a biography of Frida Kahlo to a historic speech about the Brooklyn Bridge. Students sharpen their vocabulary, grammar, and listening skills through explicit modeling and ample practice. Students also engage in routine, responsive writing based on an examination of the variety of texts they have read. In more extensive process-based writing lessons, students write topical essays in narrative, informative, analytical, and argumentative formats.