New Jersey Student Learning Assessments English Language Arts Grade 6

Luis had promised his sister, Cora, that their lemonade stand at Nettles Beach, on Raritan Bay, would stay open until the last beach umbrella came down. The sky had another plan. A dark shelf of cloud slid in like a lid closing over a pot.

The first drops tapped the cooler. Fourteen cups were still stacked. Cora wanted to wait for the family that always bought two. Their striped umbrella already lay flat on the sand, a bright coin someone had dropped and forgotten.

Luis looked at the flag by the lifeguard chair. At noon it had hung limp. Now it snapped toward the street, a sleeve trying to point them off the sand. Their father's rule was simple: when the flag leaves the pole's shadow, pack up, even if the cooler is full.

He poured the last pitcher into the dune grass instead of the cups. The wasted lemons stung, but the rule was about the storm, not about the money. They folded the table while the bay turned the color of a tarnished spoon. Cora held the cups against her chest so the wind would not spend them down the boardwalk.

On the steps she asked if the family would be angry. Luis said the family would be somewhere dry, which was the same place he and Cora needed to be. The cooler banged his knee like a stubborn drum. He did not open it again.

Cedar Cup Bog is in the Pine Barrens, a short drive from Chatsworth. A visitor sheet explains that the growers use two harvests, and that the methods solve different problems.

In a dry harvest, workers move through the beds and pick by hand or with small rakes. The fruit stays whole. Growers choose this method when the berries will be sold fresh, because a crushed berry spoils faster in a carton.

In a flood harvest, the beds are filled with water on purpose. A machine knocks the berries loose. Cranberries have small air pockets, so they float. Crews corral the floating fruit and pump it out. The sheet says this faster method is for berries that will become juice or sauce, where a soft fruit is acceptable.

The sheet tells readers not to treat the word flood as a name for rain. Pumps put the water in. A rainy week does not, by itself, turn a dry harvest into a flood harvest.

Last October, Cedar Cup Bog used both methods in neighboring beds on the same day. The fresh beds stayed dry. The juice beds were flooded. The difference was the plan for the fruit, not the weather.

To the Library Board: Please keep the Tide Street Branch in Jersey City open on Saturdays. That is the day many students in our building can get there. Weekday hours end at 5:30, and the late bus does not reach the branch until 5:40.

The board's notice calls Saturday hours lightly used because the door counter averaged forty visitors. A counter does not show what those visits were for. On the Saturdays I was there, the tables were full of students finishing projects they cannot print at home. Forty quiet workers can look like a small number and still be a full room.

Closing Saturdays would not erase the need. It would move that need to weekday evenings the bus does not make possible. I am not asking for new Sunday hours. I am asking you to keep the one day that matches our ride.

Respectfully, Dev Patel

I took the window seat at the Red Kettle on Bloomfield Avenue, in Montclair, because the counter was full of regulars who already knew one another's orders. I was new in town, and I did not want to be a person who had to be explained.

The waitress, Nia, set down water without asking. “Grilled cheese is fast. Soup is slow. The soup is the one people wait for.” She said it as a fact, the way someone reports the weather.

I had twenty minutes before a bus to my aunt's apartment. Fast was the sensible choice. I watched a man at the counter close his eyes over a spoon as if the soup were a story he wanted to finish. The smell of tomato and dill reached the window and made my bus schedule feel rude.

“I'll wait for the soup,” I said. Nia nodded, not surprised. She did not ask why I had changed my mind. When the bowl came, I ate slowly enough to miss the bus on purpose. Outside, the next bus sighed at the curb and left without me.

I was still a new person in the diner. I was no longer in a hurry to prove it.

The lamp at Sandy Hook is a dull coin in the gray. It does not spend its light. It only turns, and turns again, as if the bay were a pocket it keeps checking.

A gull cuts the fog like a white stitch pulled loose from a coat. Below, the bell buoy clears its throat and says the same word the tide already knows.

I came for a clear view of the city across the water. The fog kept the city. It gave me the bell, the stitch, and the coin that would not be spent.

A panel at a Meadowlands trail kiosk says that some birds use the marshes as a stop during migration. A stop is not a home. The birds feed, rest, and leave.

In spring, flocks of sandpipers drop onto the mud to feed on tiny animals in the wet ground. They stay a short time. By the time the trail grass is high, most of them are gone. The panel calls this a stopover.

Red-winged blackbirds are marked differently on the same panel. They nest in the reeds and remain through the breeding season. The panel calls them seasonal residents. A visitor who sees both kinds of birds on one morning should not decide that both are staying.

The panel's map uses two shapes. A circle means stopover. A square means seasonal resident. Sandpiper routes are drawn with circles. Blackbird marshes are drawn with squares. The shapes keep a short pause separate from a season.

A student wrote that the marsh is a hotel and a house on the same mud. The panel allows that comparison only if the reader remembers who uses which. The mud can serve both purposes without making the birds the same kind of visitor.

Dear Parks Committee: Plot Four at the Lock Street Garden in Trenton should not be paved for three visitor spaces. I have worked that plot with my grandfather since I was nine. The tomatoes are not the only reason to keep the ground in the garden.

The committee's drawing calls the lot unused on weekdays. That drawing was made on a Tuesday morning in January, when every plot is bare. In July the same ground feeds seven households. A winter picture is weak evidence about a summer garden.

Two spaces could be marked along the alley without taking Plot Four. Those spaces would be closer to the gate and would not need a new curb. I am not against parking. I am against solving it by erasing the one plot that has a waiting list.

Please leave Plot Four in the garden. Sincerely, Elena Voss

Jonah set his science-fair case on a bench at the Maplewood station and bent to retie his shoe. The train doors opened. He stepped on, then saw the case still on the bench. The doors were about to close. He stepped back off.

A stranger picked up the case, read the tag, and held it out as the train left. “You can catch the next one,” she said. “You cannot rebuild this in the aisle.”

The next train would still reach school before the gym opened for judging. Inside the case, a glass tube would crack if the doors pinched it. Jonah thanked the stranger and kept the case in both hands.

On the following train he held the case on his lap. The tube ticked softly against the cardboard, a small clock he did not need. He watched the station sign shrink. Missing one train had felt like a disaster on the platform. From the window it looked like a pause.

A refuge sheet for a Delaware Bay beach in New Jersey describes two visitors who arrive in late spring for different reasons.

Horseshoe crabs come ashore to lay eggs in the sand. The sheet calls the beach a laying place for them. People who walk close can scare a crab back into the water before the eggs are in the sand.

Red knots stop on the same beaches to eat those eggs. The birds are on a long trip north. The sheet calls the eggs fuel for the rest of the flight. It says the knots are not there to build nests.

The sheet puts the two purposes side by side so a reader will not blend them. The crabs are starting new eggs. The birds are using those eggs to keep going. One beach holds both events.

A quiet-beach rule follows from those facts. Noise and close footsteps can send crabs back into the water or send the birds up before they have fed. Stay back, the sheet says. The rule protects the two uses the sheet has just separated.

At a you-pick field outside Hammonton, the row boss assigned Mina and her brother Theo the last row, the one beside the ditch. Theo said the last row was a punishment. Mina read the board again. The last row paid the same per pint as the first. “Last does not mean less,” she told him. Theo shook his head.

The bushes leaned over the ditch, so the darkest berries hung on the far side, above the mud. Theo wanted to skip them. “If we stay on the path, we finish before lunch,” he said.

Mina stepped onto a board someone had laid across the ditch. It bent, but it held. She filled a pint with berries that were firm and dark, not the pale ones Theo was rushing into his box from the near side. Their father had said pale berries taste like green wood. The boss later tipped Theo's box and sorted half of it back onto the bush.

They switched jobs. Theo took the board, and Mina held his belt loop. The last row took longer. When they were paid, the totals matched the rows that had looked easier. Theo tapped the ticket. “Last did not mean less,” he said. He offered the sentence as if he had picked it, like a berry, from the far side.

To the School Board: Cedar Avenue School in Paterson needs a crossing guard at Market and Cedar for the twenty minutes before the morning bell. I am asking for a person with a stop sign, not another study that stays in a folder.

Last Wednesday I counted while I waited. Twenty-two cars passed while students were in the crosswalk. Eleven of those cars did not stop. The city's letter calls the corner safe enough because there were no crashes last year. No crashes is not the same as no close calls. A count of what did not happen leaves out the cars that did not stop.

I walk with my younger brother. We cannot move the bell, and we should not have to dash. A guard from 7:40 to 8:00 would cover the rush. After the bell, the corner is quiet, so I am not asking for an all-day post.

Please put a guard on that corner before the bell. Sincerely, Mateo Ruiz

A panel at Lock 7 Museum, in a New Jersey canal town on the old Morris route, shows how a lock lets a boat change levels.

A lock is a chamber with gates at both ends. The boat enters at the low end. The lower gate closes. Water is let in from the higher side. As the water rises, the boat rises with it. The boat does not climb a ramp. The water does the lifting.

When the water inside matches the higher level, the upper gate opens and the boat leaves. Going down reverses the steps. The boat enters at the high end, water is let out, and the boat sinks to the lower level.

The panel sets this water lift apart from a story some visitors tell, that a lock is an elevator with cables. The model has no cables. The only thing holding the boat up is the water under it.

Labels on the model use three words in order: enter, match, leave. The order matters. Opening the upper gate before the water matches would let the high water rush in too fast. The panel says the gates wait for the match.

Dear Front Street Playhouse Board: Please keep the Wednesday student matinee in Red Bank. It is the only show many of us can see, because evening tickets cost more and the late train home is unreliable.

The board packet says the matinee loses money because the seats are half full. Half of that theater is still ninety students. We pay a lower price, so adult-ticket math makes the show look like a loss. The packet does not mention the worksheets our English classes finish after the show, or the essays that quote lines we heard in the room.

I am not asking you to add a Thursday performance. I am asking you to keep the one afternoon schools can reach by bus. A smaller audience that came to study the play is still an audience.

Sincerely, June Harlow

A field card for Little Sedge Marsh, on Barnegat Bay, explains how cordgrass holds the muddy edge.

Cordgrass grows where the tide covers the ground and then leaves it. The roots catch mud that would otherwise wash away. The card says the grass does not stop the tide. It slows the water enough for mud to settle.

Visitors often call the marsh empty because they do not see trees. The card disagrees. The open look comes from salt and from roots that live in wet ground. Trees that need drier soil do not take over. Empty would mean nothing is working. The card says the marsh is busy underground.

The card splits the day into high tide and low tide on purpose. At high tide, small fish use the grass as cover. At low tide, the mud shows snail trails and fiddler crab holes. A picture of only one tide would hide the other half of the day.

The last line warns about a plan to replace the edge with a concrete wall. A wall can block waves. It does not give fish cover, and it does not catch mud. The card does not call walls useless everywhere. It says a wall is a different tool, and at this edge it would end the work the grass is doing.

Priya met her aunt at Lantern Pier, on the Jersey Shore, in January. The boardwalk shops wore plywood over their windows like eye patches. The summer lights were packed in a closet behind the fudge counter, and the air smelled like cold salt instead of sugar.

Aunt Rosa had a list: check the freezer, look for a leak, and count the tins. Priya had wanted the errand to feel like a secret mission. The list made it ordinary, and she was almost disappointed.

Then they found a thin line of ice along the inside of the back wall. It glittered like a zipper left half open. Rosa followed the ice up to a cracked pane. The wind had been visiting all month.

They taped cardboard over the crack and set a bucket under the drip. Priya's job was to write the date on the tape. She pulled one glove off, wrote “January 12,” and put the glove back on before her fingers could argue.

On the way out, Rosa bought hot chocolate from the only open window on the pier, a newsstand that never boarded up. Priya looked back at the patched shop. It did not look healed. It looked paused, the way a sentence looks when the writer still means to finish it. She added a note to the list: come back after the next storm.

I went with my neighbor, Mr. Duarte, to the Saturday market in Newark's Ironbound. He said I could pick the peppers for the stew if I learned the difference between pretty and useful.

The brightest peppers were huge and waxed. They shone like traffic cones under the tent. Mr. Duarte passed them. He picked up a wrinkled red one, pressed its shoulder, and smiled when it gave just a little. “Soft means it will cook down,” he said. “Shiny can still be a brick in the pot.”

I had been reaching for the shiny pile because I wanted my choice to look like a good choice. That reason was about me, not about the stew. I put the shiny pepper back. Its skin squeaked, a small protest I pretended not to hear.

We bought six wrinkled ones. At home they collapsed into the onions and turned the broth red. The heat arrived late, after the sweet. I understood the test in the aisle. My eyes had voted first, and they had voted for the wrong job.

Members of the Council: Haddon Ford, our South Jersey town, should keep the summer reading bus for another year. I am not asking for a new route. I am asking you not to cancel the stop that already serves the apartment court on Miller Street.

The budget note calls the bus a duplicate because the town library is two miles away. Two miles is a short drive and a long walk in July, with a stack of books and no sidewalk on the highway ramp. For students whose adults work day shifts, the library's noon story hour might as well be in another town.

Last summer the bus lent six hundred books at that court. The note counts late fines, which were low, and then calls the stop quiet. Low fines can mean the books came back. Quiet can mean people were reading, not that they stayed away.

Please leave the Miller Street stop on the route. Thank you. Samir Greene