Sixth Grade

The Sixth Grade year at the Laguna Blanca Middle School is a year of great excitement and challenge and serves as a bridge between childhood and adolescence. It is the second year in a four-year sequence wherein the students make the transition from a typical elementary school structure to a typical high school structure. There is an emphasis on the development of sound study skills, enabling the students to grow in independence. It is a year of increasing intellectual, physical and emotional change; a time of exploration, discovery, and development.

History: In the study of ancient civilizations, we examine the recurring patterns and themes of religion, government, daily life, and cultural contributions, beginning with prehistory and continuing through the development of the Viking culture, from the perspectives of a historian, an anthropologist, and an archaeologist. Students are asked to regularly report on current event topics, generating class discussion where parallels are drawn between the development of ancient cultures and the world around them. Enriching and supporting our classroom curriculum are the Primitive Living Skills outdoor educational experiences in early October, and Archaeological Dig and Conference in the spring.

Language Arts: The Sixth Grade curricular reading list is composed of quality children’s literature that reflects the students' current stage of development with the themes of coming of age, critical thinking, and deductive reasoning. Literary selections were chosen from a list of recent, classic, and award-winning authors of historical fiction and mysteries for young people. A balance of male and female main characters are represented to ensure that all students have a literary contemporary in which to personally relate. Book examinations included class discussions on the four elements of story and literary devices.

The focus of the writing instruction in the sixth grade, the five-paragraph essay, lays the foundation for the remainder of the students’ academic careers. This process helps to remove the conceptual ambiguity of writing from student-produced work and allows each child to focus on developing specific writing skills through guided instruction and practice. Grammar instruction utilizes multiple modalities while building on the students’ previous learning of parts of speech and parts of sentences. A phonetic-based spelling program and vocabulary and homophones studies are also presented.

In addition to the humanities, students receive instruction in mathematics, science, computing, art, music, and foreign language from teachers who specialize in those fields of study.