Illinois Assessment of Readiness English Language Arts Reading Grade 6

The museum in Ottawa had room for one new display beside its model canal boat. The glass case already held a small wooden skiff, a faded rope, and a brass plate giving the scale. Clara’s class was asked to supply a label about the people who had used boats like it. She volunteered to design the label because she liked drawing boats and thought the work would be simple.

At the first meeting, Clara brought an illustration with a straight-backed captain at the stern. Her classmate Tomas brought a copied notebook page from the museum’s archive. It listed repairs, wages, and days lost waiting at a lock. Nothing on the page described a captain standing at the stern. Clara set her drawing over the notebook so the table would look less crowded.

Ms. Vale, the curator, lifted the drawing’s edge. She asked where Clara had found the captain’s uniform. Clara admitted that she had imagined it. Ms. Vale did not ask her to throw the drawing away. She laid a blank card beside it and wrote two headings: “Documented detail” and “Artist’s reconstruction.” Clara had to decide where each part belonged.

Over the next week, the class examined three repair entries. One noted a split plank that took two days to replace. Another recorded extra payment for someone who worked through a wet afternoon. A third listed the price of rope. Clara began drawing the underside of the boat instead of its tall, confident captain. She asked Tomas whether the notebook ever named the person who repaired the plank. It did not.

Their first finished label included all three entries, but its tiny lettering was almost unreadable from the front of the case. Ms. Vale stood where a visitor would stand and asked the class to read it without leaning against the glass. Clara could see only her own large title. She removed two decorative borders and chose one repair entry for the main label. The other entries went on a second card available at the desk.

On opening day, a visitor looked from the skiff to Clara’s drawing of its underside. “I never think about the bottom of a boat,” he said. Clara pointed out the repaired plank, then stopped herself. The archive described a repair to a boat of this kind, not proof that this exact model showed that repair. She explained the difference. The visitor stayed to read the label, and Clara left her finger resting on the edge of the glass.

The following texts were written during a student discussion about the reading room at a fictional Joliet community center.

NOTICE FROM THE CENTER MANAGER For four weeks beginning in February, the reading room will close at 6 p.m. on weekdays instead of 8 p.m. Repairs to its heating system must be completed after the daytime programs. The gym and meeting rooms will keep their usual evening hours. Books from the reading room may be borrowed before 6 and returned in the lobby drop box. Groups with evening reservations may request a meeting room, subject to availability. The center will review the repair schedule at the end of the four weeks.

LETTER FROM STUDENT AMANI RUIZ I saw the phrase “usual evening hours” and nearly put the notice down. The gym is not where my brother and I do homework. Our apartment is full of conversation after dinner; that is part of what I like about it, but it makes reading a long chapter difficult. We reach the center at 6:15 after my aunt’s shift. Borrowing a book earlier is not an option for us on those weekdays.

I am not asking workers to repair the heating while students sit under their ladders. I am asking whether one meeting room can be kept quiet for homework during the four weeks. A reserved room for a large group would still need to come first, and I know there are only two meeting rooms. Perhaps the center could post a weekly list of evenings when one is free. That would let us plan before we travel.

The notice says groups may request a room. I do not belong to a registered homework group, and neither does my brother. I would like the center to consider students who arrive by themselves as well. At school, I asked twelve classmates when they use the reading room. Five said after 6. That is a reason to ask more students, not a count of everyone who might need it.

REPLY FROM THE MANAGER Thank you for distinguishing a quiet place to work from access to borrowed books. We cannot promise an unused room every evening, but we can post availability each Friday. During the repairs, individual students may use an available meeting room as a shared quiet space. Existing reservations remain in place. We will ask users to sign in without recording the content of their homework, then review how often the temporary space is used.

The nature center at Cattail Pond, in a forest preserve along the Des Plaines River, hands skaters a winter sheet. The sheet says a slab of pond ice floats. It gives one cause: ice floats because it is less dense than liquid water. On the sheet, density means how much mass sits in a given space. The same space of ice holds less mass than that space of liquid water, so the liquid can hold the slab up.

The sheet then sets aside reasons skaters often swap in. Colder only reports the temperature. Solid only reports the state. A slab that was heavier than the water it displaces, or denser than that water, would sink. Floating is not proof that the ice is heavier. The sheet says the ice is less dense.

The sheet also describes the particles. In the solid, the molecules leave wider gaps than they leave in the liquid. Those gaps are why a block of ice is less dense than the liquid. The cause the sheet wants skaters to remember is the comparison itself: ice is less dense than liquid water.

The weekend sheet at Red Barn Cider, on a county road outside Princeton, accounts for every gallon in the cooler. The cooler held 45 gallons of fresh cider on Friday night. Workers sold 27 gallons at Saturday's market. They sold the other 18 gallons at Sunday's porch stand. The sheet says the cooler was empty by Sunday evening.

Twenty-seven plus 18 is 45. Saturday's sale was the larger one. Sunday's sale was smaller. A worker who says the stand sold only 27 gallons is counting Saturday and skipping Sunday. The sheet does not call 27 the total.

Next to Saturday the manager wrote "light jug." On this sheet, light jug means a sale under the 30 gallons Saturday usually sells. Saturday's 27 is 3 gallons under 30. Sunday's porch stand plans on 16 gallons, and 18 is 2 gallons over that plan, so the manager did not write light jug beside Sunday. The phrase marks Saturday's gap only.

A card in the window of a bike shop in Evanston compares two rides to a Lake Michigan beach. The lakefront path is 9 miles and takes about 55 minutes. The ridge streets are 6 miles and take about 80 minutes. Miles measure how far the wheels travel. Minutes measure how long the rider is out. The card prints the two measurements on separate lines.

The ridge streets are shorter and slower. The lakefront path is longer and quicker, because it has fewer stops. A rider named Rhee said, "I want the ridge streets so I will arrive sooner." The card does not say that. Six miles of stop signs can take longer than 9 miles on an open path. A shorter ride is not automatically a faster one.

The card is a comparison, not the story of one Saturday ride. It sets the two routes together, miles first and minutes second. A rider who wants fewer miles picks the ridge streets. A rider who wants less time picks the lakefront path. The card gives both measurements and lets the goal decide.

At a public library in Urbana, Amina found a sketchbook on the floor by the atlas shelf. No one was reaching for it. She liked the drawings of bridges and wanted to take the book home. Her father had said she could keep a found book if it had no name.

Then she opened the cover and saw a pocket with a phone number and the name Juniper. The pocket showed that someone expected the book back. Liking the drawings did not erase the number. Amina used the desk phone and called.

A girl from the reading room answered and ran over, saying Juniper was her sketchbook. The book left Amina's hands. Her wish to keep it had been real. The name and the number decided the matter. She stayed for her own homework, and she used the desk phone only long enough to place the call.

The Saturday board at Riverside Center in Aurora lists three blocks. Lane swim runs from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and is for adults only. Family swim runs from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. A child under 12 must be with an adult during family swim. The gym stays open until 4:30 p.m. and does not require a pool band.

Mateo is 10. He arrives with his aunt at 9:45 a.m. He may swim then, because family swim has started and an adult is with him. He may not enter lane swim, because that block is for adults and he is 10. If he comes back at 12:20 p.m., family swim is over. He can still use the gym until 4:30 p.m. The gym hours are not the pool hours.

A friend tells Mateo that the whole center closes when lane swim ends at 9:00 a.m. The board keeps the blocks apart. Lane swim, family swim, and the gym have different times and different rules. The end of one block does not lock the building.

The school paper in Champaign printed an editorial about a sign the ecology club posted beside the rain garden, where buses idle. The club wanted riders to know why the garden sits lower than the sidewalk and why the plants can stand in water after a storm. The editor quotes the club: "The sign is for the wait, when people are already looking down."

The sign does not sell anything. The garden is on school ground. A teacher suggested posting the same words in the cafeteria, where students eat and leave. The club said no, because those readers would not be looking at the plants. The editorial explains the choice of place.

The editorial does not tell readers how to build a rain garden. It gives no list of tools or soil layers. It stays with the audience at the bus idle and with the cafeteria spot the club declined. The dip in the ground and the wet-soil plants are what the sign points out to people who can see them.

A painted panel at a harbor office in Waukegan compares two pieces of water. Open Lake Michigan receives long waves that have had miles to grow. A stone breakwater stands between that open water and the inner harbor. The panel says the inner harbor misses those long waves because the breakwater blocks them.

When a hard wind comes off the land, the inner harbor can still build short, steep chop. The panel treats that chop as a separate case. Blocking the long waves is the breakwater's work. A land wind is a different cause, and it can roughen the harbor even while the wall keeps those long waves out.

A visitor said the inner harbor is calm because the water there is always shallow. The panel does not give that cause for the missing long waves. Shallow water appears only as a separate note about a few slips beside the office. It is not why the long lake waves stop at the wall.

By late afternoon, the Galena bindery smelled of paste and damp wool coats. Rain had driven customers into nearby shops, but the bindery remained quiet. Eva sat at a low table stitching a practice booklet. Her aunt, Ms. Pell, worked at the tall bench with a blue journal open in front of her.

Eva pulled her thread too quickly. A knot caught at the paper’s edge. Her aunt set down a needle, loosened the knot, and returned to the blue cover without speaking. Eva watched the movements: through the fold, around the older stitch, gently tight. She had expected binding to involve more pressing and less waiting.

A man entered carrying a red cover. He wanted a journal finished before the shops closed. Ms. Pell opened a drawer. One spool of the linen thread remained, with its center showing through. She measured a length against the blue journal and closed the drawer.

“I can take this for next week,” she said.

The man offered extra payment for that evening. Eva imagined what the money might buy: a new cutting mat, perhaps, or a brighter lamp above her table. Ms. Pell shook her head. The blue journal had been promised to a neighbor collecting family letters after a move. She would finish it first, and the thread left afterward would not be enough for the red cover.

After the man went away, Eva suggested using a cheaper cotton thread for the blue journal. Her aunt ran a finger along the fold. “That isn’t what we agreed to make,” she said. She placed the last length of linen beside Eva’s crooked practice stitches, where Eva could see its smooth, even surface.

Outside, the rain eased to a sound like pages turning. Eva cut out the damaged fold in her booklet and made a fresh one. This time she drew the thread through slowly enough to notice when it began to catch. At the tall bench, her aunt finished the final stitch. She did not rush to open the next cover.

The neighbor arrived carrying a box of letters tied with ordinary string. She spread one carefully on the bench. Ms. Pell set the blue journal beside it and explained how the pages could hold the envelopes without bending them. Eva looked from the box to her own blank booklet. She turned it over and checked the stitches inside, not the neatness of the cover.

The paper at a middle school near the Shawnee hills prints an interview with Ranger Inez, who leads a loop in Shawnee National Forest. The student asks what she carries, and why.

Ranger Inez says, "A folded paper map, even on days when the radio is clear. In March the radio died in a creek hollow. The map still showed the loop. I also carry a whistle. Two short blasts mean the group should stop where it is. They do not mean the trail is closed. On Thursday a hiker heard the blasts and started back toward the lot. I had only wanted the line to wait while we lifted a fallen limb."

The student asks what she leaves behind. She answers, "I do not carry the weather in my pack. If the clouds are building, I say what I see, and each hiker decides. On that walk my job is the trail and the people who signed the sheet, not every road in the county."

Last April a town on the Spoon River planted switchgrass along a bend where the bank was bare. Before the grass, wakes from small boats struck open mud, and chunks of the bank fell into the current. People who fished the bend said the edge crept inland a little each spring.

After the grass thickened, the same wakes still reached the bend, but the stems took the force out of the water. Less mud left that bank. The river did not stop, and the boats did not go away. The change was in the strip of bank, where the water arrived with less power.

A critic said the planting failed because boats could still be seen. The town's report does not use disappearing boats as the test. The test is the mud. Before, the bank lost soil. After, it lost less. The wakes continued. The grass changed what the wakes could do to the soil.

At a community hall in Quincy, the fiddle class begins with four taps on the music stand. The teacher, Mr. Solis, says the taps mean "bows up" and are not the tune. The tune is "Porch Lamp," which he wrote for the class. It starts on the downbeat after the taps.

Wes, new that night, heard the taps and played them again in the middle of the tune. Mr. Solis stopped the group. Repeating the taps does not play "Porch Lamp." The signal only sets the start.

A listener in the back row asked to hear just the taps again, then said she had heard the piece. Mr. Solis said she had heard the signal. The piece is the tune that follows. He played the four taps, paused, and then played "Porch Lamp" so the difference was easy to hear.

A one-page flyer from a nature center on the edge of Bloomington invites neighbors to collect free prairie seed. The pickup is Saturday, and only while the lot gate is open, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The flyer says the sacks sit in an unlocked shed during those hours. It asks each person to bring a bucket. It does not mention Sunday.

The flyer gives one reason to come inside that window. After 1:00 p.m. the staff locks the shed, and the gate closes with it. A neighbor who arrives at 2:00 p.m. will find both shut. The flyer does not say the seed will be set out again the next morning.

Readers who want planting directions will not get them. The flyer names no depth, no spacing, and no tool but the bucket. Its job is to bring people to the shed while the gate is open. The lock, not a gardening lesson, is the point of the hours.

A family card for a day at the state fair in Springfield gives a rule for where to meet the pie judging. If the heat index at 10:00 a.m. is 95 degrees or higher, judging is indoors in Exhibition Hall. If the 10:00 a.m. index is under 95, judging stays on the infield at 11:00 a.m. This morning the posted index at 10:00 a.m. is 97, so the pies are indoors.

Cousin Dell says they should go to the infield because the fair always judges pies there. The card does not say always. It says the 10:00 a.m. reading decides, and today's reading is 97, which is over 95. The infield plan is for a cooler morning.

The card adds two times that do not move with the pies. New entries to Exhibition Hall stop at noon. The outdoor music stage still runs until 4:00 p.m. even when the pies are inside. Moving the judging does not cancel the music, and it does not keep the hall open for new entries past noon.

A trail card for Hawk Notch, on a bluff above the Mississippi near Savanna, gives one safety rule. Turn back if you cannot see the next blaze. The next blaze is a blue square that, in clear air, stands 20 steps up the path. The card says the overlook is not a reason to ignore a missing blaze.

In the fog, the narrator can see the path for about 8 steps. The blue square is not in sight. A friend says the overlook is close and they should keep walking. The narrator stops. Eight steps of sight is less than the 20 steps to the blaze, so the card's test is not met.

The friend is guessing about the overlook. The card's test is the blaze, not a guess about how near the view is. Because the narrator cannot see the blue square, the rule says to turn back. They turn back at the last clear post and leave the overlook for a day when the square shows.

The school planetarium in Normal opened to families twice each spring. Its student committee had a small budget for improving the show. Some members wanted a brighter projector so the star patterns would stand out. Others wanted an audio guide describing the images for visitors who could not easily see them. The budget could not cover both proposals at once.

Committee member Malik drafted a survey asking, “Would you like our show to have amazing new stars?” Twenty-three students answered yes. He brought the result to the meeting as evidence for the projector. Jo, who had helped lead a family visit, asked why the survey had not mentioned the audio option. Malik said that adding another choice would only confuse people. Jo put a visitor comment beside his survey: “My daughter could hear the speaker, but he kept saying ‘over here’ and ‘that bright one.’ We could not tell what those directions meant.”

The science teacher asked the committee to test both ideas before voting. A borrowed projector made the images sharper, and the students could distinguish several stars that had looked blurred. The committee then tried a short script that named positions and described the shapes between stars. They invited six volunteers to listen without looking at the dome. Four could sketch the intended pattern from the description; two could not.

Jo revised the script after asking the two volunteers where they had lost track. Malik helped her replace “on this side” with more exact directions. He noticed that a clear description also helped him find a faint star when he looked back at the dome.

At the final meeting, Malik did not withdraw the case for a projector. He listed the sharper image as a benefit, then read the visitor’s comment and described the script test. The committee funded a recorded audio guide first and kept the projector proposal on next year’s list. Its written decision named who each improvement would help and what they still had not measured.

Afterward, Jo thanked Malik for supporting the audio guide. He pointed to his first survey, now attached behind the revised one. “I asked one question,” he said. “I thought I had asked the whole question.” At the next family show, both students stood near the exit, with blank comment cards.