This webpage provides an overview of what your child will learn by the end of each grade in middle school by the Iowa Core, our statewide academic standards. The English and Language Arts Iowa Core standards focus on key concepts in reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language.
6th Grade
When your child arrives at middle school, they are ready to apply the skills they learned in earlier grades to make sense of longer, more challenging books and articles. They will better understand how authors try to influence readers, find reasons to support their ideas, expand their vocabularies, and use new words in their stories, report, and essays.
Examples of Your Child’s Work at School:
- Analyze how chapters of a book, scenes of a play, or stanzas of a poem fit into the overall structure of the piece and contribute to the development of ideas or themes.
- Gain knowledge from materials that make extensive use of elaborate diagrams and data to convey information and illustrate concepts.
- Evaluate the argument and specific claims in written materials or a speech, and distinguish claims that are supported by reasons and evidence from claims that are not.
- Present claims and findings to others orally, by sequencing ideas logically and by accentuating main ideas or themes.
- Write arguments that provide clear reasons, relevant evidence, and use credible sources.
- Determine the correct meaning of a word based on the context in which it is used (e.g., the rest of the sentence or paragraph; a word’s position or function in a sentence).
Read the Iowa Core Parent Guide (English) and Iowa Core Parent Guide (Spanish).
7th Grade
Your child will analyze, define, compare, and evaluate ideas when reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Readings will include classic and contemporary pieces with diverse perspectives. In addition, students will use relevant evidence to support their own points in writing and speaking, make their reasoning clear to readers or listeners, and constructively evaluate others’ use of evidence.
Examples of Your Child’s Work at School:
- Cite several sources of specific evidence from a piece when offering an oral or written analysis of a book, essay, article, or play.
- Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a nonfiction work and analyze how the author takes a position different from other authors.
- Organize and focus writing with supporting statements and conclusions based on evidence and show that the evidence is accurate and reliable.
- Avoid plagiarism and follow a standard format for citations (e.g., footnotes, bibliography).
- Evaluate a speaker’s key points and reasoning, ask questions and state his or her own well-supported ideas in discussions.
- Use common, grade-appropriate Greek or Latin affixes and roots as clues to define the meaning of a word (e.g., semi-, semi-annual, semicircle).
Read the Iowa Core Parent Guide (English) and Iowa Core Parent Guide (Spanish).
8th Grade
To prepare for bigger challenges in high school, students this year must grapple with major works of fiction and nonfiction that extend across cultures and centuries. As they work to understand precisely what an author or speaker is saying, students also must learn to question an author or speaker’s assumptions and assess the accuracy of his or her claims. They also must be able to report findings from their own research and analysis of sources in a clear manner.
Examples of Your Child’s Work at School:
- Analyze where materials about the same topic disagree on matters of fact, interpretation, or point of view.
- Learn how authors support their ideas through word choice, sentence and paragraph structure, and other methods.
- Build writing around strong central ideas or points of view; support the ideas with sound reasoning and evidence, precise word choices, smooth transitions, and different sentence structures.
- Analyze the purpose of information presented in diverse media (e.g., print, TV, web), and evaluate its social, political, or commercial motives.
- Use strong, active verbs to create a clear picture for the reader (e.g., walk, skip, meander, lurch, limp).
- Interpret figures of speech (e.g., irony, puns) and develop a large vocabulary of general academic words and phrases.
Read the Iowa Core Parent Guide (English) and Iowa Core Parent Guide (Spanish).
Source: Iowa Core Parent Guides from the Iowa Department of Education.
Read the complete standards at www.iowacore.gov.