6th Grade Curriculum

 

Humanities in grade 6 is an interdisciplinary experience combining Language Arts and Social Studies. Grade six Humanities is a one-year program preparing the students in organizational skills through the study of Ancient Civilizations. Students in grade six expand their understanding of history by studying the people and events that ushered in the dawn of the major Western and non-Western ancient civilizations. Geography is of special significance in the development of the human story. Continued emphasis is placed on the everyday lives, problems, and accomplishments of people, their role in developing social, economic, and political structures, as well as in establishing and spreading ideas that helped transform the world forever. Students develop higher levels of critical thinking by considering why civilizations developed where and when they did, why they became dominant, and why they declined. Students analyze the interactions among the various cultures, emphasizing their enduring contributions and the link, despite time, between the contemporary and ancient worlds. By using a wide variety of historical and fictional texts for the study of history, students engage in rigorous skill building in the fields of literary response and analysis, reading comprehension, and vocabulary development. They examine newsworthy current events that affect their present time. The program uses hands-on student centered project-based curriculum.

 

By the end of grade six, students have mastered the four arithmetic operations with whole numbers, positive fractions, positive decimals, and positive and negative integers; they accurately compute and solve problems. They apply their knowledge to statistics and probability. Students understand the concepts of mean, median, and mode of data sets and how to calculate the range. They analyze data and sampling processes for possible bias and misleading conclusions; they use addition and multiplication of fractions routinely to calculate the probabilities for compound events. Students conceptually understand and work with ratios and proportions; they compute percentages (e.g., tax, tips, interest). Students know about pi and the formulas for the circumference and area of a circle. They use letters for numbers in formulas involving geometric shapes and in ratios to represent an unknown part of an expression. They solve one-step linear equations.

 

This course dynamically investigates and analyzes important concepts of Earth Science and how they relate to the physical world through thematic questions. During class time, we develop skills using various formats: lectures, labs, readings, exams, computer-assisted research, Socratic discussions, and individual and group projects. We strive to instill in the grade six student a true curiosity and interest in the earth, formation of the universe, and how that directly interacts with their physical surroundings.