6th Grade


The Sixth Grade math program helps students develop the skills, strategies and confidence necessary to become powerful problem-solvers.

Sixth Graders stretch and flex their mathematical minds by working on a variety of rich problems that have real-world connections. On a typical day, students are encouraged to explore multiple ways of thinking through problems, verbalize their strategies, and justify their reasoning. Through actively engaging in mathematics, rather than simply practicing procedures, students discover the value of talking, reasoning, and making connections in math. The primary resource for sixth-grade math is published by Illustrative Mathematics. Supplementary lessons and resources are used to ensure that students have rich opportunities to work on topics including number and operations, ratio and proportion, expressions and equations, geometry, and statistics.

Essential Questions

  • How can I use what I know to figure out what I don’t know?
  • How is math valuable in my life?
  • How does making a mistake help me grow?
  • Learn more about our Math curriculum:
    Selector View Curriculum

    6th Grade Math

    • Number Sense and Operations

      • Reinforce and extend understanding of fractions, decimals, and percents and the relationships among these concepts and their representations
      • Understand estimation as a tool for a variety of situations and develop strategies for estimating results of arithmetic operations
      • Develop and analyze algorithms for computing with fractions and decimals and develop fluency in their use
      • Work flexibly with fractions, decimals, and multi-digit whole numbers to solve problems involving all four operations
      • Develop meaning for integers and represent and compare quantities with them
      • Use absolute value notation and understand that the absolute value of a number as its distance from zero on the number line
      • Develop understanding of the distributive property

      Ratio and Proportion

      • Develop understanding of ratios and rates and use equivalent ratios to solve problems
      • Represent equivalent ratios with double number line diagrams, tape diagrams, and tables
      • Use ratios to solve problems about situations involving color mixtures, recipes, unit pricing, constant speed, and measurement conversions
      • Recognize that equivalent ratios have equal unit rates
      • Represent percentages as expressions, double number line diagrams, tape diagrams, and tables
      • Solve problems involving percentages including situations related to tax, tips, and discounts


      • Find areas of polygons by decomposing, rearranging, and composing shapes
      • Use the terms “base” and “height,” and find areas of parallelograms and triangles using algebraic formulas
      • Calculate areas of composite regions by decomposing them into polygonal regions
      • Represent polyhedra with nets and find their surface areas
      • Distinguish between surface area and volume
      • Solve problems involving surface area of prisms and pyramids and volume of rectangular prisms
      • Plot pairs of signed number coordinates in the plane and use coordinates to calculate horizontal and vertical distances between two points

      Expressions and Equations

      • Use order of operations and grouping symbols to write and solve expressions
      • Understand and use the terms “exponent,” “coefficient,” “variable,” and “equivalent expressions”
      • Represent, analyze, and generalize a variety of patterns with tables, graphs, words, and symbolic rules
      • Develop an initial conceptual understanding of different uses of variables
      • Use variables to represent unknown values and equations to represent relationships
      • Recognize and generate equivalent forms of algebraic expressions
      • Reason about and solve one-variable equations
      • Evaluate expressions at specific values of their variables

      Data Analysis

      • Use measures of central tendency to analyze the shape and spread of data