Sixth Grade Common Core ELA-Aligned Literacy Lesson Plans for Using Technology

School Improvement Network Blog Post Features Sixth Grade ELA Common Core Literacy Lesson Plan with Shadow Puppet App

new blog post outlining a sixth grade Common Core ELA literacy lesson plan using digital technology to increase student literacy. The blog post is available to all educators on School Improvement Network’s Common Core Blog.

“If taught effectively, the Common Core State Standards will help students master the skills they need to be successful in college or a meaningful career,” said Chet D. Linton, CEO and president of School Improvement Network. “Resources like this sixth grade Common Core ELA lesson plan show how the Standards build towards real work and education skills such as collaboration, strategically using digital media and visual displays and use data to express information.”

The sixth grade Common Core ELA lesson plan aligns to standards CCRA.W.6 and CCRA.SL.5. The lesson plan outlines an activity for students to write an original story and present it using an app that makes shadow puppets to help them incorporate digital technology.

Click here to see the blog post with the sixth grade Common Core ELA lesson plan.

Click here to see a sixth grade Common Core ELA writing lesson plan based on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Click here to see a Common Core math lesson plan for teaching the Pythagorean Theorem.

Common Core — Creating Experts in Our Field

COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS

By Deia Sanders
Master Teacher and Instructional Coach

Yes, we are seeing great teaching and new methods in the classroom thanks to the challenge of meeting the rigor of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and students are able to not only answer questions, but also discuss and communicate deeply on the process. But as an instructional coach, one of the most exciting changes I’m seeing is the improvement in our teachers.

I am in a district where we are currently teaching and writing units of study for ELA and mathematics. For anyone who has tackled this task, you know it’s a long road of pouring your heart, mind, and energy into creating something that almost immediately needs to be changed again. While it may be a daunting and frustrating task to some, it truly is inspiring to others. The growth we’ve seen in our teacher teams tasked with writing these units is unbelievable. They’ve become experts at teaching, merging, researching, and developing ideas, practices, and lessons. We’ve gone from a culture that simply taught the curriculum handed to them on a pacing guide they were forced to keep, to one in which we not only let kids explore and guide the pace of learning, but the methods we use to teach are ones that we’ve had conversations with grade levels below and above to know the level to begin and end the content on.

We no longer make a lesson plan from a guide in a book. We are sitting down with the standards, the Model Content Frameworks, viewing videos, looking at practices, pulling resources, looking at prototypes, writing tasks based on prototypes, talking to other grade levels, creating our own materials, etc.—each lesson is a research project that although may be exhausting, the process creates a true expert that stands in front of kids to teach and facilitate the learning.

When I entered a class last year and the teacher said “we’re just reading today,” it was always just that. This year when I enter a class and they are “just reading,” it’s amazing. The kids are reading alright, but they are charting characters and their traits, making inferences and notes as they read, and coming together on deep discussions on anything from the plot of the book or chapter to if “grandpa” is a character or not because they haven’t had interaction with him yet. Yes, 11-year-olds using the word “interact” to describe a personal experience with a text—and this is “just reading.” In math, the kids are exploring, teaching, developing methods, sharing, and discovering unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The lessons differentiate themselves because almost everything they do is a visual or conversational formative assessment that drives their next step.

I’m thankful for the CCSS and excited about what it’s doing for our students. But the process of digging into the CCSS and expectations of the assessment has created unmatched job-embedded professional development. This experience has taken my colleagues and me from teachers to experts in our field, and that is going to have an unmatched impact on our students!

Crickets in the Common Core Standards

Barbara Hollenbeck is a fourth grade teacher who has already begun to implement the Common Core Standards. In the following video, newly released from the Common Core 360 library, Hollenbeck demonstrates Common Core ELA Standards SL.4.1, W.4.8, W.4.10.

Click here to watch the video on the Weekly Video Blog.


In this segment, Barbara Hollenbeck, a fourth grade teacher at Kerrick Elementary in Louisville, Kentucky, facilitates a science lesson in which her students classify crickets as insects. Barbara aligns her lesson with Common Core ELA Standards Speaking and Listening 4.1, Writing 4.8, and Writing 4.10.

Hollenbeck explains, "We are beginning to do the food chain. We have explored soil. We have explored plants and seeds, and we’re creating our own terrarium."

Barbara’s morning message invites students to review and discuss the life science concepts they have learned. Today, the students explore new concepts as they add crickets to their terrariums.

Save your seat at the free webinar and Q&A session featuring Barbara Hollenbeck on Sept 25!

Hollenbeck continues, "Through their discussion in groups and as a class, Barbara’s students progress towards Speaking and Listening standard 4.1 by building on others’ ideas and clearly expressing their own. They now move to the hypothesis-­‐testing phase of the activity by gathering and recording evidence of the crickets’ anatomy."

Now you’ve told me that this is an insect and you told me why. You told me that it had three body parts. What was one of the body parts that you noticed? Skylar, can you identify another body part that we haven’t mentioned? We’ve said the head and the thorax, we’ve said the wings and the antenna.

Their observations of the crickets have prepared students for two simple experiments. One involves gently touching the antennae eye with a pencil eraser and recording the cricket’s response. In the second experiment, students place a tent-­‐shaped piece of paper in the container with the cricket. The students predict how the cricket will respond to the tent, then observe and compare their predictions to its behavior.