Sixth Grade - ELA
1: Environment and Cycles
Unit 2: The People of Sparks
Lesson 4
The Disaster
Activity 2 (Antecedents and Pronouns) instructs students to make sure pronouns match the number of their antecedents and to use the correct gender, with explicit incorrect/correct examples (birds/they; Lina/she). The activity also tells students to be consistent and not switch pronouns unnecessarily and gives an example showing a problematic switch in person. The Student Activity Page requires students to circle pronouns, underline antecedents, and rewrite sentences where antecedent and pronoun do not agree, and the answer key provides corrected versions of several sentences.
Lesson 6
Flags
Students complete fill-in-the-blank and correction activities that target pronoun form and antecedents (e.g., they fill blanks with possessive, objective, or subject pronouns and identify the case). In the correction activity students rewrite sentences such as "The bike belongs to she" to "The bike belongs to her," "Him and his brother planned to be roamers" to "He and his brother planned to be roamers," and "Will them and the people of Sparks..." to "Will they and the people of Sparks...?". Students are asked to identify the antecedent and the pronoun case for each correction and to produce spoken sentences using subjective, objective, and possessive pronouns.
Lesson 9
Conflict
The Combining Sentences activity directs students to "Use pronouns to effectively combine them" and gives practice items where students replace repeated nouns with pronouns (e.g., combining "The people of Ember... The people of Ember felt..." into a sentence using "they"). The provided possible answers show students producing pronouns such as "they," "he," and "them" when combining clauses. The sequencing and combining exercises require students to rewrite and merge sentences, which gives opportunities to practice pronoun substitution in context.
Unit 3: Short Stories
Final Project
Writing a Short Story
The rubric asks students to evaluate whether they "keep the point of view consistent," and Activity 2 directs students to decide whether to tell the story in first or third person and to consider whether a third-person narrator knows characters' thoughts. Activity 5 instructs students to "stick with a consistent point of view" as they write and to refer back to their point-of-view decisions when drafting. Parent notes also prompt discussion of the selected point of view and how to keep it consistent.
2: Force and Power
Unit 1: Bull Run
Lesson 2
Pink and Say
Activity 2 asks students to choose a 1–2 paragraph passage and rewrite it from Pink's first-person point of view or from an omniscient third-person narrator, explicitly noting that Pink's version should use "I" and an omniscient narrator should use "he" and "she." The parent notes repeat that a Pink-centered narration uses the "I" perspective and an omniscient narration uses "he" and "she," and instruct students to include what characters are thinking and feeling. These tasks require students to change and use pronouns appropriate to a chosen narrative person.
Final Project
Argumentative Essay
Students are explicitly told to avoid using the first-person pronoun "I" in formal writing and are given an example replacing "I believe" with a direct claim. Students are instructed to edit and revise their essays for grammar, and to refer to a "Handy Guide to Writing" for grammar and punctuation rules. The rubric and draft-marking tasks require students to mark verbs (underline verbs, circle helping verbs, box linking verbs) which involves attention to grammatical forms.
Unit 3: Number the Stars
Lesson 7
Run!
The lesson introduces the editing abbreviation "Pron" and asks students to edit a paragraph using that abbreviation. Students are given sentences with pronoun errors (e.g., "My mother and me decided…," "Her and Ellen knew…," "no one had it harder then them") and are instructed to rewrite the paragraph correcting the indicated problems. The answer key marks those specific items with "Pron," showing students identify and correct pronoun usage/case errors.
3: Change
Unit 1: Tuck Everlasting
Lesson 8
The Gallows
Students are asked to identify parts of speech in sentences and to place the correct symbol above each word, and the provided answer keys explicitly label pronouns (e.g., she, him). The activity pages contain sentences with pronouns in various persons and numbers for analysis (e.g., "Winnie found that she could scarcely breathe." and "No!" she was screaming, for now she hated him.). The parent notes also suggest asking the child to label pronouns as part of the parts-of-speech work.
Lesson 10
The Water and the Toad
Students identify pronouns as parts of speech in the "Parts of Speech Sentences VII" activity, where underlined words are classified and the answer key marks several items as pronouns. Students review types of pronouns in Part II by labeling sentences as interrogative, indefinite, or demonstrative pronouns. The parent answer key explicitly lists pronoun labels for the practice items.
Unit 2: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Lesson 11
Trouble
The Student Activity Page explicitly lists a "Pronoun problem" proofreading symbol and shows example corrections, and it states that the page contains suggestions and corrections embedded within sample sentences demonstrating each proofreading symbol. The Editing and Revising activity asks students to read through their rough draft and make changes to correct mistakes and to use the editing symbols page to correct their paper, giving students an opportunity to apply the pronoun-problem mark to their own writing.
4: Systems and Interaction
Unit 3: Secret of the Andes
Final Project
Narrative Essay
Students are instructed to write the essay in first person, using "I," and to tell the story as if they are Cusi. Students complete graphic organizers and prompts that require describing how Cusi felt using first-person phrasing for events and the conclusion. Students are evaluated with a rubric that explicitly lists "Point of view consistency" under Voice and are directed to use editing symbols and a Handy Guide to Writing when revising.
