One key 6th grade reading skill

Surprise! This teacher’s description of the new expectations for student reading is nothing like the sixth grade most parents remember.
YouTube video

Deborah Park teaches sixth grade at Mendez Intermediate School. These days, when a sixth grader reads, there’s so much more involved than grabbing a book. Check out the many skills involved in sixth grade reading.

Video transcript

“So when they come into the sixth grade from elementary school, they already have a pretty solid understanding of how to get the main idea from a text. But I want them to be able to now master how to analyze text effectively. I want them to be able to make more connections with what they read, relate it to the world that they live in, to understand the main lessons, the themes from that story or from that poem. It’s important for students to be able to analyze the text that they are reading in sixth grade because starting from seventh grade and going all the way into high school, they are going to be reading more rigorous texts that are only understandable if you understand the context, the history, the writer’s background, and to be able to see all those different perspectives and gain a lesson from those texts is a very important skill that makes a good reader, and that’ll also help them become better writers and better critical thinkers.”

Learn more about your sixth grader’s learning and development this year, including:


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