Core Chomp 6th Grade

We use Core CHOMP as a bell ringer in our middle school ELA classrooms, and it is by far one of the most important ELA curriculum tools that we use.

The purpose of Core CHOMP! grade six is to provide three questions a day that are based on the Common Core State Standards for sixth grade English language arts. These comprehensive exercises reinforce the standards and will increase your students’ reading and writing skills, often challenging them with complex texts as they read and comprehend literature including stories, poems, and informational text.

Format

Core CHOMP! can be used as a warm-up activity, a homework assignment, or as a closure for your class. There are 180 standards-based exercises, one for every day of the school year, and they are built around a rotating five-day pattern. Students will read a poem on day one, a complex fiction passage on day two, and an informational text on day three. Days four and five will address writing, research, and language. A printable pdf version is included as well as the Easel digital version. Easel is super easy to use so if you want to go paperless and use this digital version, it's all ready to go!

We designed the exercises in Core CHOMP! so that by the end of the year, students will have read, comprehended, and been asked to provide evidence of their analysis of a wide variety of literature and informational texts. In addition, we created this resource so that students would spend time thinking through the writing and research process.

Many of the Core CHOMP! exercises are not easy, but neither are the requirements of the Common Core State Standards. The program of daily exercises helps students gradually gain mastery of a wide variety of material, as required in the standards. These exercises will require your students to complete tasks including the following:

• rewrite texts using effective techniques and well-chosen words and details
• make inferences on what they have read
• support answers with text
• develop a claim using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence
• analyze the author’s purpose and literary elements
• determine themes or central ideas of texts
• assess whether reasoning provided in a text is sound or not
• determine the meaning of words, phrases, and figurative language
• analyze text structure used by an author
• and much more

If you choose to use this as a warm-up or closing for your class, we suggest giving your students several minutes (usually between 5-8 minutes) to work through the questions on their own before going over them as a class. If you choose to use this as a homework assignment, we suggest you go over it in class the next day. Either way, you will find that students are repeatedly exposed to material that reinforces the sixth grade ELA standards.