New York State Testing Program English Language Arts Grade 6

The horn on the 6:40 ferry from St. George did not rise like music. It scraped, a long metal complaint, and then the boat shoved off for Whitehall. I was headed to a dentist near Battery Park with my father, both of us half awake. The cabin lights were the color of weak tea. Through the window, the Verrazzano's lamps looked like stitches holding a dark coat closed.

Father chose an indoor bench and set our backpack on it. I wanted weather on my face, so I stood at the side door, where the wind reached me and the spray did not. We could still see each other. That was the bargain. A deckhand whose name tag read Ellis wiped the rail and answered a tourist. The tourist hoped the next boat would be calmer because it would be less crowded. Ellis separated the two ideas. Crowding is a count of people. Chop is what the wind does to the water. A full boat can have a smooth ride, and an empty one can pitch.

In my first class draft, a barge looked parked on the harbor. Then its wake reached us, and our deck lifted once, a slow shrug. The barge had been moving the whole time. I replaced parked with creeping. Father let the horn sentence stand. He said a sound compared with a scraped door tells more than the single word loud.

When we walked off at Whitehall, I kept two corrections in the margin: people are not waves, and still-looking is not the same as stopped.

At Lockport, our class pressed against a rail while a small work boat entered chamber 2 from the lower level. Ms. Alvarez, the lock tender, called the chamber a water elevator. She did not mean a cable and a glass car. She meant that closing the lower gates and letting upper-canal water in would raise the surface the boat was floating on. The gauge that morning showed a rise of 11 feet. No hook came down from above. The boat rose because the water rose.

A fourth grader asked how the boat kept from sinking while the chamber filled. Ms. Alvarez had him watch the waterline on the hull. The line sat at the same paint mark at the bottom of the rise and at the top. The boat was afloat at both heights. The fill changed the level of the canal surface. It did not change the boat into something that had to go under.

A painted sign listed the visit in three steps: watch the gates close, watch the water rise, then walk the upper towpath to see the boat leave. We were told to use the tender's clock for the fill. Her clock started when water began to enter and stopped at 8 minutes. My phone started when the gate motor hummed, and it showed 9 minutes. The extra minute was my early start.

On the bus I wrote one line under the sketch: the lock lifts the water, and the floating boat goes up with it.

Stone Fence Orchard, outside New Paltz, runs its cider press on the third Saturday of October. This year that Saturday was the 18th. A card on the barn door says visitors may stand at the rope and watch. They may not put a hand on the screw. Mr. Ellison nailed the card there after a visitor last year turned the screw past the mark and cracked a basket.

Two kinds of apples wait in the yard. Crates stamped eating go to the farm stand, and those apples are supposed to look unblemished. Apples with spots go to the hopper for juice. Caleb, who came with a school group, held up a spotted apple and asked if it should be thrown past the fence. Mr. Ellison dropped it into the hopper. A spot decides the apple's job. It does not decide that the apple is trash.

The crew pressed 30 bushels and caught 90 gallons in the tank. A visitor told her sister they could bottle 90 gallons of finished cider before lunch. Mr. Ellison tapped the tank tag. The tag read fresh juice. Chilling and a check came next. Bottling was on the schedule for Monday, in a different room, with caps the press barn does not keep.

Caleb copied the door card into his notes and added the hopper example under it. Watching and turning, he wrote, are different permissions. Spotted and wasted are different judgments.

The Market Branch in Rochester should keep its Thursday hours until 8 p.m. I am Denise Okonkwo, the evening clerk, and I am writing for the neighborhood sheet because a proposal would lock our door at 5. Parents who leave work at 6 already miss that earlier closing. The clock at their job ends after the hour the proposal would choose.

Last Thursday I counted the desk log. Twenty-eight people checked out books after 6 p.m. Eleven of them said they had come straight from work. The morning hours, which open with the public market, already serve shoppers who come early. Cutting Thursday evening would remove the block of time those 28 people used.

A budget line says an evening hour costs the branch one clerk's wage. The cost is real. The wage is already on the schedule as a split shift. The same clerk works a Friday morning that the log calls quiet: last Friday, four checkouts before noon. Moving one Thursday hour onto that existing Friday shift spends time the branch is already paying for. It does not invent a second employee.

I am asking the board to keep the 8 p.m. closing for eight Thursdays and to publish the door count. If the count falls, the board will have a record it can use to shorten the trial. One vote should settle the trial, and the published count should settle what happens after it.

The dock card at the Saranac program is a set of rules. Counters stand at the public dock from 7 to 8 a.m. and record adult loons. A pair is two adults within one boat-length of each other. A single adult is written as single. Two singles on the same lake stay singles. Chicks go in their own column and are never folded into the adult total.

Tuesday's team saw four adults. One pair floated close, almost hull to hull, and two other adults fished far apart, one by the reeds and one near the buoy. Jonah added the four adults and wrote 4 pairs. Ms. Petit set his sheet beside the card. Close together made one pair. Distance kept the other two as singles. The adult total was still four. The pair total was one.

Wednesday fog covered the dock at 7:20, and the leader stopped the count. The note box received the word fog. Tuesday's numbers stayed on Tuesday's line. A blank morning is an unfinished watch. A zero would claim the team saw no birds. A copied row would claim they had seen Tuesday's birds again.

The habit the card teaches is definition before arithmetic. Jonah's addition was neat. It answered a question the card was not asking.

Snow leaned across Plymouth Avenue instead of dropping straight. A wind off Lake Erie drove the flakes at the front of our house, and they stuck to the siding in ragged lines. I wrote that the lake threw them, so a reader could picture the strike against the boards. The lake does not have an arm. The verb is a picture of force, and I mean it to stay a picture.

Mom called the weather a band. The radio forecaster used that word for a strip of heavy snow with lighter air on both sides. Our block sat in the heavy strip. Two blocks toward downtown, a bus still showed a clean yellow side. Our own windows had gone white. Same city, different strip: that was Mom's point when she turned the radio up.

In my journal I wrote, The city disappeared. The sentence was too proud of itself. The porch light, the steps, and the blue shovel were in arm's reach. What I could not see was the corner storefront. I scratched the grand line and wrote that the corner vanished first.

Dad asked whether band and storm were interchangeable on our street. I told him the forecaster's band had edges. The way I had been using storm did not. A band explained why the bus was yellow and our windows were not.

The garden lot on Eagle Avenue in the Bronx had twelve raised beds and eighteen households that wanted one. In April the council met under the awning and faced that shortage directly. The first proposal, offered by a new member, was to accept the twelve people who had signed the clipboard earliest and turn the other six away. Ms. Ferrer, who keeps the clipboard, said early signatures mostly showed who had heard the announcement first.

The trial they posted was a split. Each bed would be shared by one pair of households. Before planting, the pair had to file a one-page plan. Two families could not both claim the middle of the bed for tomatoes. If tomatoes were included, they belonged on the north edge, so the vines would not shade leaf crops through the brightest part of the day. Leaf crops could fill the rest.

In July, sixteen of the eighteen households were still coming. Two had moved out of the neighborhood. The April rule, still taped to the shed, said a share stayed with its pair until the fall meeting. The council did not hand the empty halves to new names in July. Those halves waited.

The account moves from a shortage, to a rule that was rejected, to a sharing trial, to the July result, and to the sentence that kept empty halves from spreading early.

The paper on the post at 30th Avenue was short enough to read without shifting your feet. It said the E trains would not stop at that station on Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the N trains would stop, and riders should use the N for Manhattan. Luis read the first sentence and stopped. He turned to his sister and told her the station was closed.

Ines read the next two sentences aloud, with her finger under the words, and the announcement changed shape. The station stayed open. One service skipped it. Another did not. Luis's worry had a clock inside it. A soccer game in Manhattan started at noon, and he had pictured the two of them stuck in Queens.

The station clock read 9:10 a.m. Ines tapped both the clock and the word Sunday. The skip had a day and a span of hours. It was Sunday, and 9:10 sat inside 8 to 4, so the E would pass them. The N was the train the notice named. Nothing in the three sentences canceled the N or closed the turnstiles.

A station worker confirmed an N would arrive on the usual track. Luis folded the bus transfer he had pulled out as a backup. The transfer belonged to a different vehicle, and it became unnecessary once the second and third sentences were allowed to count. His first reading had been faithful to one line and careless of the paragraph.

Ms. Rahman's sixth graders in Brooklyn are getting ready to walk across the bridge. She gives every student two cards. Card A is this year's class plan. The group enters the pedestrian path from the Brooklyn side at 9:00 a.m. If the students stay together, the walk to the Manhattan end takes about 40 minutes. On the wooden boards, bicycle riders are asked to walk rather than ride while the class is there. The card does not ban bicycles from the rest of the bridge.

Card B is a note saved from last year's trip. That class entered from the Manhattan side at 11:00 a.m. and walked toward Brooklyn, because the students were already at a museum on the Manhattan side. Card B says nothing about bicycles.

A student asks which card is the real one. Ms. Rahman answers that both cards were real for the mornings that printed them. This year's trip starts in Brooklyn, so Card A is the plan the group will follow. Card B records a different bank and a different hour. Using Card B's clock for this class would gather everyone on the wrong side of the river.

Card A also plans for a late group. If the class misses 9:00, the next entry is 10:30, still from Brooklyn toward Manhattan. There is no 9:30 line. Card B's 11:00 start does not fill that gap. A late start changes the time and leaves the direction alone. Silence on Card B cannot be copied onto Card A as a bicycle ban, because the bicycle sentence lives only on this year's card.

The drama club at Ithaca Middle posted three Friday times for the dress rehearsal of its canal-store play. Actors were called at 3:30. Crew was called at 4:00. The full run would begin at 4:30. The bottom line of the posting said a person who appeared only at the run had missed a job, not merely a chance to sit in the house and watch.

Nora plays the clerk. She arrived at 3:40, breathing hard, and told Pete, the stage manager, that ten minutes could not matter at a rehearsal. Pete turned the clipboard. Her costume check was set for 3:35, and the costume volunteer had already moved down the list. Nora completed the check after crew call. Beside her name the volunteer wrote the words late, done.

Pete read that pair of words as a record. Late named the missed slot. Done named the check that happened afterward. The run still started at 4:30. Pete kept the run at 4:30 because the scene-change cues were ready and the custodian needed the stage at 6:00.

He would not push the company earlier to scold one actor, and he would not slide the run later and collide with the custodian. Nora's delay stayed in her row of the clipboard. It did not become the company's new clock.

Mr. Adeyemi stood at the Saturday market in Syracuse with flour on his sleeves and a page of notes. He spoke to the market committee. The west-row stall should stay outdoors on Saturdays, he said. His customers step off the west-side bus and see his table before they see the hall. He had counted fifteen regular buyers who got off that bus before 9 a.m. An indoor stall on the east side of the hall would put a building between those buyers and the bread.

A committee member reminded him that rain had wrecked two Saturdays and that indoor tables had stayed dry. Mr. Adeyemi agreed about the rain. He did not treat his own stall as a failure. A canopy he already owns covered the table both days, and he lost no bread to water. Dry space indoors is a real good for a vendor who has no cover. It is weak evidence against a vendor whose cover held.

He ended with a choice. Vendors with canopies could remain outside. Vendors who wanted the hall could move. The indoor hall could stay on the map. His claim was about his row and the bus stop.

The scene is told by a narrator who stands near the table, quotes Mr. Adeyemi, and reports the committee member's rain example. The speaker is the baker. The narrator is not.

Mist climbed the railing at the Niagara overlook and beaded on Lena's jacket in a cold sprinkle. From inside the hood, the falls sounded bigger than the slice of water she could see. She wrote roar, then drew a line through it. Roar dragged an animal into the sentence. The sound she heard was steady, more like a highway that never finished passing.

Her brother called the water angry. Lena asked him what she could point to if she wanted to check that word. He laughed and said he had meant the speed. They kept fast. They dropped angry. Fast matched the white water rushing at the base. Angry named a mood neither of them could show with a finger.

A ranger added that the green in the water had to do with depth and with minerals, and that a sign on the lower path explained it. Lena did not move that explanation into the lines she was keeping. She had set herself a limit: words for sound and motion, the kind she could test by standing still and looking again. A science note could be true and still belong on the sign.

She left the overlook with three keepers: climbed, steady, and fast. Roar and angry stayed in the crossed-out margin.

On the second floor of the museum in Albany, a card beside a wooden model reads, canal freight boat, about 1900, scale model. The card gives no boat a personal name. Jordan wanted one added. Family stories said his great-grandfather had worked a freight boat called the Heron, and the cabin in the model looked, to him, like the cabin in a photo at home. He asked Ms. Singh, the educator on the floor, if the label could say Heron.

Ms. Singh asked what evidence the card already contained. The model had been built to show a layout: cabin at the stern, open cargo area, tiller at the back. No line on the card, and no number carved on the hull, tied that layout to one family's boat. A matching shape is not a matching name.

Jordan could still tell the Heron story. He could write it on a family page in his report, not inside the museum card. The card's job was general design. The report's job was a relative. If the card took the name, visitors would leave believing the case held the Heron.

He filled out a comment card in block letters: Please keep the label general. I will keep the Heron in my report. The passage follows Jordan in the third person as he asks, listens, and separates the two jobs.

At 7:05 p.m. a summer storm in Poughkeepsie dropped a limb on the line behind the laundromat. The block went dark. Mr. Chen, who owns the shop, first blamed his machines, because three dryers quit in the same second. Then he checked the outage map on his phone. The dark patch ran from his street to the school two blocks north. Three machines were a symptom inside a larger event.

The limb was the cause. What followed branched. Shops lost their lights. The traffic signal at the corner blinked red. Evening practice at the school was canceled. The coach's note on the door blamed the gym lights. A reader who stopped at the canceled practice could invent a story about a bad game. The note would not support that story.

Power returned at 9:40. Mr. Chen wrote 7:05 and 9:40 on a card for the insurer and labeled them outage. Rain had already quit by 7:30. He kept the end of the rain separate from the end of the outage. The passage moves from a cause, to effects that branch, to a record that holds three times apart: the limb and the blackout at 7:05, the rain's end at 7:30, and the lights' return at 9:40.

Samir Shah volunteers with the rowing club on the Rondout in Kingston. He spoke at the council table with two bids in a folder. The repair bid is $4,800. It replaces six loose planks and one bent cleat, and it frees a gate that sticks. The rebuild bid is $41,000. It would replace the whole dock next year. Samir's claim was narrow: the city should do the repair this spring so kayaks can launch in May.

A council member called the repair a waste if a rebuild was already imagined. Samir agreed that a rebuild might still be right later. A year of no dock is not free. The club has 22 youth members, and this neighborhood has no other public launch. A summer without the Rondout dock would cancel their practice water. That loss does not appear in the $41,000 figure, and it is still a cost.

He slid the repair bid to the middle of the table and left the rebuild bid in the folder, visible. Order was his point. Fix the planks, the cleat, and the gate now. Decide the larger dock when the larger money is actually in hand. Waiting spends a season the bid sheets do not mention.

A narrator reports the meeting from beside the table, in the third person. Samir is the speaker. The council member supplies the objection. The bids supply the numbers.

I tied an apron at half past six in Mrs. Pell's shop in Utica. The case held cookies with icing divided in a clean curve. I called them the same thing I had called cookies on a trip to a bakery in New York City. Mrs. Pell stopped me. Here, she said, they are half-moons, and the name and the icing belong to this region. She wanted my journal to describe the case in front of me. A memory from a different counter was not a description of her tray.

That morning the case held 24 half-moons and 10 fig cookies. A customer asked for a dozen half-moons. I know a dozen is 12. In the rush, the word swelled, and my hands reached for the whole tray of 24. Mrs. Pell tapped twelve cookies and then the counter. The order and the supply were different numbers. Selling what was asked would leave 12 half-moons and all 10 fig cookies still for sale.

I wrote the correction before the next customer: name what is in this case, and count what the person asked. The record is mine, in the first person. Mrs. Pell is in it as the one who corrects me. The mistake that matters is mine. I let a familiar word and a familiar cookie grow larger than the order.

A dozen stayed twelve after she tapped the cookies. The tray of 24 was the supply. The customer's sentence was the order. I had mixed the two, and the tap pulled them apart.

The sign at the main pool in the Montezuma marsh says the water is kept shallow in April so migrating shorebirds can stand and feed in the mud. Deep water would suit ducks that dive. The April level is a decision with a purpose. It is a pool set for a kind of feeding, after winter, on purpose.

Our group counted 11 shorebirds and 2 ducks. A classmate wrote that the pool had failed, using the small duck count as the proof. Mr. Ortiz, the ranger, set the notebook against the sign. Few ducks fit a shallow April pool. The 11 shorebirds fit it too. The count was evidence that the plan was working.

Shallow, on that sign, means water a shorebird can stand in and still reach food. It does not mean empty, and it does not mean the ducks were driven off as pests. Dive ducks are simply not the birds this month's water is set for.

The passage lines up four moves: the sign's purpose, the morning's count, a classmate's misreading, and the ranger's correction. The sign's aim is the idea that remains after the word failed has been answered.