6th grade writing lesson

Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans

6th Grade Writing

For sixth graders, this Common Core area helps students gain mastery of writing skills by working collaboratively and producing written texts, understanding syntax and vocabulary, and organizing their ideas. Among the complete standards for this grade, sixth graders will be asked to: begin to effectively use evidence, reason, arguments, sources and language to support a written text, demonstrate command of formal style, improve reader comprehension of written texts by employing techniques like graphics, multimedia, and formatting, employ facts, definitions, quotations, details, and other information to develop written topics, use appropriate technology to publish writing and to collaborate on written projects, demonstrate keyboarding skill, go through the process of writing, editing and revision for their written work.

Haiku: Write Your Own!

This worksheet features the Japanese poetry style haiku.

Write Rhyming Couplets

Time for some poetic rhyming couplets!

Abraham Lincoln Bio Poem

Your students will write a bio poem about Abraham Lincoln.

Back to School Diamante Poem

Teach your students a fun way to write diamante poems using our new back to school worksheet.

Bio Poem: My Mother

A fun Mother’s Day bio poem activity for your students!

Bio Poem: Pilgrim

A biography poem, also called a bio poem, is a short poem which describes a person or thing. This printable Thanksgiving Activity guides students through creating a bio poem about Pilgrims.

Bio Poem: Someone You Know

Students will write a bio poem about someone they know using the format set in this worksheet.

Christmas Tree Bio Poem

A biography poem, also called a bio poem, is a short poem which describes a person or thing. Sometimes writing a bio pem can be tricky! This printable Christmas Activity guides students through creating a bio poem about a Christmas tree.

Correct the Transition Words Mistakes – Worksheet

Have your students revise sentences and correct transition word mistakes with this educational writing activity.

Diamante Poem: Antonyms

Students write an antonym diamante poem in the space provided.

Diamante Poem: Synonyms

A diamante poem takes its name from the shape it makes: a diamond. Diamante poems were introduced in 1969 by Iris Tiedt. Students write a synonym diamante poem in the space provided.

Edgar Allan Poe; Journalist Trickster

Students read about one of Edgar Allan Poe’s hoaxes when he was a journalist. Each student then write’s their own hoax!

Edgar Allan Poe: Secrets in Poetry

Students read from Edgar Allan Poe’s “An Enigma” and decipher the name of the woman’s whose name is hidden within the text.

Father’s Day Bio Poem: My Father

Enhance your students’ writing skills with this fun Father’s Day Biography Poem activity.

Fourth of July Bio Poem: America

Encourage your students to learn about America with this Fourth of July Biography Poem activity.

George Washington Bio Poem

Your students will write a bio poem about George Washington.

George Washington’s List of Rules

When George Washington was a young boy, he made a list of rules for himself. Students choose one of the rules and write what it means.

Halloween Bio Poem Activity: Ghost

Create a bio poem about your own personal ghost with our fun Halloween printable activity!

Identify the Topic Sentence

The topic sentence in a paragraph states the main idea of the paragraph. While it is usually at the beginning of the paragraph, it also can be in the middle or end of it. Students underline the topic sentence in each activity.

Identify the Transition Words

Help your students identify different transition words with this printable writing worksheet.

Grade Level Resources

Discover ideas and strategies that support literacy learning, specially curated for this grade band.

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Grades 4 - 8

Beyond History Books: Researching With Twin Texts and Technology

Spelling Cheerleading: Integrating Movement and Spelling Generalizations

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Spelling Cheerleading: Integrating Movement and Spelling Generalizations

Editing Checklist for Self- and Peer Editing

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Plot Diagram

Word Family Sort

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Trading Card Creator

Printing Press

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Artistic Elements: Exploring Art Through Descriptive Writing

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Lesson plans.

We have hundreds of standards-based lesson plans written and reviewed by educators using current research and the best instructional practices. Find the perfect one for your grade band.

Get the GIST: A Summarizing Strategy for Any Content Area

In this series of lessons, students read newspaper articles obtained from newspaper websites.

Peer Edit With Perfection: Effective Strategies

Do students' eyes glaze over when they try to edit their own writing? Give them a fresh perspective with peer editing.

Letter Poems Deliver: Experimenting with Line Breaks in Poetry Writing

Letter poems are a particularly apt medium for exploring a defining characteristic of poetry—line breaks.

Compiling Poetry Collections and a Working Definition of Poetry

This unit introduces poetry forms and craft elements while students explore poetry about everyday topics or themes.

Student Interactives

Engage your students in online literacy learning with these interactive tools that help them accomplish a variety of goals—from organizing their thoughts to learning about language—all while having fun.

Alphabet Organizer

Engage students and build phonemic awareness by using Alphabet Organizer in the classroom.

Grades K - 12 | Student Interactive

Theme Poems

In this online tool, elementary students can write poems based on shapes from five different categories: Nature, School, Sports, Celebrations, and

Grades K - 5 | Student Interactive

The interactive Printing Press is designed to assist students in creating newspapers, brochures, and flyers.

Timeline allows students to create a graphical representation of an event or process by displaying items sequentially along a line.

Professional Development

Multiple Texts: Multiple Opportunities for Teaching and Learning

Using texts that first meet the reading "levels" of middle school students, then offering increasingly challenging books, teachers can group studen

Explore Resources by Grade

Free tools to make your students better writers and readers .

Quill.org, a non-profit, provides free literacy activities that build reading comprehension, writing, and language skills for elementary, middle, and high school students.

Writing Across the Curriculum: Quill's nonprofit mission is to now build both reading and writing skills through free, OER content across the curriculum. Over the coming years, we will be building a library of free ELA, social studies, and science activities that engage students in deeper thinking through writing prompts that provide immediate feedback.

9 million students have written 2 billion sentences on Quill.

Quill Reading for Evidence

Provide your students with nonfiction texts paired with AI-powered writing prompts, instead of multiple-choice questions, to enable deeper thinking.

Students read a nonfiction text and build their comprehension through writing prompts, supporting a series of claims with evidence sourced from the text. Quill challenges students to write responses that are precise, logical, and based on textual evidence, with Quill coaching the student through custom, targeted feedback on each revision so that students strengthen their reading comprehension and hone their writing skills.

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Culture & Society Topics

"Should Schools Have Grade Requirements for Student Athletes?"

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"How Does Eating Meat Impact Global Warming?"

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Quill Connect

Help your students advance from fragmented and run-on sentences to complex and well structured ones.

Using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining, students combine multiple ideas into a single sentence. They then receive instant feedback designed to help them improve their clarity and precision.

Quill Lessons

The Quill Lessons tool enables teachers to lead whole-class and small-group writing instruction.

Teachers control interactive slides that contain writing prompts, and the entire class responds to each prompt. Each Quill Lessons activity provides a lesson plan, writing prompts, discussion topics, and a follow up independent practice activity.

Quill Diagnostic

Quickly determine which skills your students need to work on with our diagnostics.

The diagnostics cover vital sentence construction skills and generate personalized learning plans based on the student’s performance.

Quill Proofreader

Proofreader teaches your students editing skills by having them proofread passages.

Students edit passages and receive personalized exercises based on their results. With over 100 expository passages, Proofreader gives students the practice they need to spot common grammatical errors.

Quill Grammar

Students practice basic grammar skills, from comma placement to parallel structure.

Quill Grammar has over 150 sentence writing activities to help your students. Our activities are designed to be completed in 10 minutes so you have the freedom to use them in the way that works best for your classroom.

How Quill Works

Set up your classroom, without it.

You can quickly and easily set up your classroom in Quill by inputting student names or providing students with a unique code. If you use Google Classroom or Clever, you can automatically set up your classroom with one click.

Choose activities

Decide if you want your students to proofread passages, combine sentences, or complete a diagnostic. Use our ten minute activities as building blocks during your classroom instruction.

Use easy-to-consume reporting

Use our reporting to spot trends and identify growth opportunities. Monitor comprehension on specific writing standards.

Get immediate feedback for your students

Save time grading and watch your students correct their mistakes instantly.

Intervene where students struggle

See exactly where your students need intervention with our comprehensive reports.

Differentiate learning to meet the needs of all students

Assign specific activities for ELLs and students with learning differences.

Engage students with adaptive activities

Challenge students with questions that automatically adapt based on their previous responses.

Align with the Common Core Standards

Easily meet Common Core language standards with our aligned activities.

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Grade 6 Writing

Discover grade 6 writing standards.

Sixth-grade writing is all about demonstrating complexity in original work. Learners at this grade level are expected to continue developing their English language arts skills to better articulate their thoughts effectively and showcase the writing skills they’ve acquired during their time in elementary school. In Grade 6, you child should write stronger arguments, more engaging stories, and present factual information with ease.

Similar to the lower grade levels, your child will continue to develop a strong understanding of the relationship between reading and writing, as they will now have to start analyzing information to determine the main points of a text in order to inform their writing.

Grade 6 Writing Goals:

I can write clear arguments and provide evidence to support my claims
I can maintain a formal or informal tone throughout my writing
I can write strong conclusions and story endings
I can use linking words and phrases to connect ideas and paragraphs
I can research and include facts in my reports
I can use dialogue and vary the pace in my narratives
I can use technology to produce and publish my writing
I can clearly write in different styles and text types
I can write with stamina for a sustained period of time

Grade 6 students will predominantly focus on three key writing approaches:

Opinion Writing

Informative writing, narrative writing.

The advice below will set up your child for sixth-grade writing success!

Argument and opinion writing are very important writing skills, as they allow learners to effectively voice their opinion and share different perspectives on the same piece. Once they master these skills, they’ll be able to state a clear point of view and support it with reason and evidence.

Arguments should be written in a formal style. Understanding the difference between formal and informal writing, and when each should be used is a skill children will learn in sixth grade.

Being able to use linking words is an important skill your child should have at this grade level. These words are the glue that stick claims and reasons, sentences and paragraphs, together. By sixth grade, children are expected to use a variety of linking words effectively when writing arguments.

Here are a few for you to practice with your children:

consequently, as a result, therefore, henceforth, moreover,
furthermore, similarly, additionally, equally, likewise,
nevertheless, even so, regardless, in contrast, despite, finally, immediately

When a child has crafted their argument by clearly stating their position, giving reasons, adding supporting details, and using linking words, they need to write a concluding statement. A concluding statement should wrap up the argument. It could summarize the main points from their argument, or rephrase their position, and it should end on a positive note.

Practice Tip

You can encourage your child to work on understanding the differences between formal and informal language by comparing two different texts and discussing their similarities and differences.

When writing informative texts, there are a variety of different strategies that children can use depending on the topic and purpose. Using definitions and cause/effect are examples of these.

Here are some top tips on how to plan an informative piece of writing:

Identify the main topic of the piece.
Create a list or discuss important points to mention.
Organize the points discussed by order of importance.
Offer a factual and neutral point of view - offering statistics if needed. Topics should be developed with facts, definitions, details, and quotations.
Be precise and clear on the points made. Use a variety of linking words to clarify the relationship between ideas and to help transition between sentences and paragraphs.

Informative writing pieces should be closed with a concluding section that summarizes the main points and leaves the reader thinking about the topic. This conclusion should offer recommendations on further reading for the audience, or leave the reader with questions relating to the future of the topic.

Work on informative writing by asking your child to write a weekly grocery shopping list, asking them to name all of the essential items which are used on a regular basis. Looking for more? Our reading & writing program for kids offers lots of lessons on how to incorporate factual information into a piece of informative writing!

Informative writing lesson series on Nightzookeeper.com.

Technique, description, and a well-sequenced plot are all expected features of sixth grade level narratives. When working on narrative writing, some aspects to focus on include a clear focus on the topic, good descriptions of characters , settings and other imagery relevant to the narrative. Narratives may also include techniques such as dialogue.

These narrative techniques are very useful, as they allow the plot to move forward and help to develop well-rounded characters.

Young writers should utilize figurative language (including similes, metaphors, and personification) and a wide vocabulary to include precise words and phrases in their short stories. Narrative writing relies heavily on providing a high level of detail with the aim to allow the reader to clearly visualize the actions, characters and settings present in the story. For example, adverbials of time and place are linking words we often use to sequence paragraphs. They show shifts in time and place that help readers follow the sequence of a narrative.

Concluding a piece of narrative writing may sometimes be challenging, as there are many techniques to choose from. We really encourage writers to try out different endings to their narrative pieces, including cliffhangers, unexpected plot twists or a classic happy ending!

The narrative lesson series on our program is a great way to help your young writer to explore narrative techniques such as pacing, description, and dialogue to move the plot forward and develop characters and events.

Narrative lesson series on Nightzookeeper.com.

How Night Zookeeper can help

Night Zookeeper is a language arts program created to support sixth grade students as they prepare for middle school. Our gamified approach to teaching writing puts an educational twist on video games to help students to stay focused, engaged and entertained as they learn!

Our program hosts a wealth of award-winning sixth-grade writing content, including challenges, writing assignments, interactive lesson series, creative writing prompts, printable resources, and much more!

With the regular feedback provided by our tutors to children, our program helps learners to develop good habits in regards to drafting and redrafting their writing.

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6th Grade Writing Activities

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30 Fun Activities For Teaching Writing At Home Themed Packet

Support sixth graders with printable lesson plans, 6th grade worksheets, and increasingly complex texts to build literacy. Students will navigate complex curriculums, demanding reading passages, and dig into algebraic expressions. Our text sets, history plays, science experiments, and lessons on research, writing, and revision will help solidify key skills.

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