What Is 6th Grade DOL?

Daily Oral Language (DOL) is a structured grammar warm-up used in K-8 classrooms across the country. In 6th grade, DOL enters middle school territory: semicolons, run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and the punctuation conventions that distinguish polished writing from careless writing.

Each morning, a sentence with deliberate errors appears on the board. Students find and fix every mistake before the class reviews the corrections together. By 6th grade, DOL sentences are built to expose errors that are easy to overlook, the kind that appear in student essays and professional writing alike.

Teachers: start class with DOL Daily. Put today's sentence on the projector as a bell-ringer. Free, no login, no setup.

Open today's sentence →

6th Grade DOL Skills

Sixth grade DOL targets writing-level grammar: the skills that separate clear, professional sentences from ones that just look wrong. The focus at this level includes:

Semicolons Joining independent clauses, using conjunctive adverbs (however, therefore, moreover)

Run-on sentences Identifying and fixing comma splices and fused sentences

Sentence fragments Recognizing incomplete sentences and correcting them

Colons Before lists, before explanations, after an independent clause

Pronoun-antecedent agreement Matching pronouns to the nouns they replace in number and gender

Commonly confused words who/whom, which/that, lie/lay, rise/raise

6th Grade DOL Practice Sentences

Ten practice sentences for 6th grade: run-ons, fragments, semicolons, colons, and pronoun agreement. Find every error and rewrite the sentence correctly. Run-ons and fragments can often be fixed more than one way, so the answers list other correct versions too. Then tap Show Answer to check your work.

1.

the storm knocked out the power, we read by candlelight until midnight
2.

my brother loves basketball he practices in the driveway every day after school
3.

because the bus was late. we missed the first half of the assembly
4.

we spent the whole afternoon at the lake. swimming, fishing, and skipping rocks
5.

you will need three things for the hike water sunscreen and a map
6.

the coach gave us one piece of advice never stop running until you hear the whistle
7.

the zoo was closed on monday however the aquarium next door was open
8.

our road trip stopped in boston massachusetts portland maine and burlington vermont
9.

the dogs barked at the mail carrier, and it would not stop until she left
10.

the author who we met at the book fair signed my copy of her new novel

Download as PDF Teachers: print it for warm-ups, sub plans, or homework. Answer key included.

How DOL Daily Works as a 6th Grade Grammar Game

DOL Daily is a free online grammar game that runs the same warm-up exercise used in classrooms every day, in a browser with no setup required. A new error-filled sentence posts each morning. Players use the built-in markup tools to fix every mistake: add a semicolon, capitalize a word, fix a fragment, correct a comma splice. Three wrong submissions and it's game over.

It's built for teachers who want a daily warm-up alongside their class, parents looking for free grammar practice for a 6th grader, and students who want to sharpen their skills before their writing gets graded on them. Learn more about Daily Oral Language.

DOL Practice by Grade Level

DOL Daily draws sentences from across all grade levels. If 6th grade is where you're starting, here's where it fits in the progression:

2nd Grade DOL Capitalization, periods, basic commas 3rd Grade DOL Apostrophes, dialogue punctuation 4th Grade DOL Commas in series, compound sentences 5th Grade DOL Complex sentences, confused words 6th Grade DOL Semicolons, run-ons, fragments 7th Grade DOL Parallelism, misplaced modifiers

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