About the Grade 6 Units
Sixth-grade writing begins with Personal Narrative: Crafting Powerful Life Stories. This unit helps students draw on their lives, learning strategies to generate meaningful story ideas, manage pace, elaborate on important scenes, and deepen insights. This unit especially emphasizes the importance of setting goals, practicing strategically, and aiming for high productivity. In Unit 2, The Literary Essay: From Character to Compare/Contrast, sixth graders learn ways to generate ideas based on close readings of a text and learning strategies essayists use to gather, analyze, and explain evidence from the text to support their claims. In Unit 3, Research-Based Information Writing: Books, Websites, and Presentations, students begin by exploring the broad topic of teen activism in order to teach their readers about a topic, using increasingly sophisticated ways to draw on and structure information to explain a position or make a call to action.
About the Series
Like the K–5 Units of Study series, the Middle School Units of Study series not only provides a coherent, systematic curriculum in the three types of writing mandated by the Common Core—opinion/argument, information, and narrative writing—it also reflects the latest research on data-based, responsive instruction.
