6th Grade

In sixth grade, English language arts instruction engages students in increasingly sophisticated interpretation and creation of texts across a variety of genres and purposes. This subject emphasizes purposeful reading, writing, speaking, listening, creating, and viewing to support comprehension and composition. Students build a deeper understanding of author’s craft, structure, and style while developing their own voice through the use of organization, craft, and technique. They expand their vocabularies and apply grammar convention knowledge, including syntax, to enhance clarity and expression. Writing instruction includes analysis and revision, with students making intentional choices based on genre, purpose, audience, organization, and style. Collaborative discussions and multimodal presentations strengthen communication skills, while research and analysis deepen students’ ability to evaluate sources, synthesize information, and support ideas with evidence. This subject must utilize the 6–8 standards and sixth grade expectations outlined in Georgia’s K–12 English Language Arts (ELA) Standards.

Sixth grade (6th grade) mathematics course content regularly incorporates the 8 Mathematical Practices, the Framework for Statistical Reasoning, and the Mathematical Modeling Framework through three big ideas of content: (1) numerical reasoning, (2) patterning and algebraic reasoning, and (3) geometric and spatial reasoning. The fundamental purpose of Grade 6 mathematics is to formalize and extend the fundamental mathematics that students learned in the previous grades. Students will build upon their numerical reasoning to perform more operations with whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, explore positive and negative numbers, and part-to-whole and part-to-part relationships. Reasoning with patterns will guide their exploration of one-step equations and inequalities to represent real-world phenomena. Students will also extend their geometric and spatial reasoning to explore complex shapes and volume. The Mathematical Practices, Mathematical Modeling Framework and Framework for Statistical Reasoning apply throughout each course and, together with the content standards, prescribe that students experience mathematics as a coherent, useful, and logical subject that makes use of their ability to make sense of problem situations.

The Sixth Grade Georgia Standards of Excellence for science are designed to give all students an overview of common strands in earth science including, but not limited to, meteorology, geology, astronomy, and oceanography. Sixth grade students use records they keep and analyze the data they collect, plan and carry out investigations, describe observations, and show information in different forms. They are able to recognize relationships in simple charts and graphs and find more than one way to interpret their findings. They replicate investigations and compare results to find similarities and differences. Sixth graders study weather patterns and systems by observing and explaining how an aspect of weather can affect a weather system. They are able to construct explanations based on evidence of the role of water in Earth processes, recognize how the presence of land and water in combination with the energy from the sun affect the climate and weather of a region. They use different models to represent systems such as the solar system and the sun/moon/Earth system. They study uses and conservation of Earth’s natural resources and use what they observe about the Earth’s materials to infer the processes and timelines that formed them.

Sixth grade is the first year of a two-year World Area Studies course. Sixth grade students study Latin America, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The goal of this two-year course is to acquaint middle school students with the world in which they live. The geography domain includes both physical and human geography. The intent of the geography domain is for students to begin to grasp the importance geography plays in their everyday lives. The government/civics domain focuses on selected types of government found in the various areas so that students begin to understand the variety of governments in the world. The economics domain builds on the K-5 economics standards; however, the focus shifts from the United States to how other countries answer the basic questions of economics. The history domain focuses on major events in each region during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.