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Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF) · English · Class 6

International English Olympiad (IEO) Class 6: syllabus, dates and exam pattern (2026–27)

Everything you need in one place — the exact NCERT chapters this paper tests, all 3 exam dates, the registration window, and the full marking scheme. Updated for the 2026–27 session.

Last verified against Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF)'s own site on 20 August 2026. Exam dates re-checked on 24 August 2026.

2026–27 exam dates

Date 1

30 September 2026

Date 2

27 October 2026

Date 3

17 November 2026

Registration: IEO is the earliest paper SOF runs all year, and that makes its first cutoff the tightest deadline on this site. Your school picks one of the three dates above; SOF's earliest sitting, 30 September, had a registration cutoff of 31 August 2026, which has now passed. Two options remain: 27 September if your school picks the 27 October sitting, or 18 October if it picks 17 November. Registration is through the school; SOF does not accept individual entries. Once the school has chosen a date it cannot be changed — ask your coordinator which of the two remaining dates it has gone with.

Free — deadline calendar

The deadline is set by your school, not by you

Most parents find the exam date and assume they have until then. The registration window closes long before it, and for some papers it has already started closing. Here is how it actually works.

  • Your school registers your child and your school picks which of the 2–3 dates the class sits. The family does not choose.
  • For SOF papers, registrations must reach SOF exactly 30 days before that chosen date — and once the school has chosen, the date cannot be changed.
  • Most bodies register through the school. Four do not have to: CREST (online, no published cutoff), Unified Council — directly for NSTSE itself at ₹350 against ₹150 through a school, and on three online sittings, NSTSE-Online, UIMO-Online and UIEO-Online, at ₹354 each including GST — Indian Talent Olympiad on its individual online route (its own later dates — Slot 1 closes 30 October), and Humming Bird (online, ₹150 a subject, no published cutoff — its two dates are picked as you register). CREST is the simplest of the four.

Closing next

  • Indian Talent Olympiad — Set A

    Registration closes 31 August 2026 · all five subjects

  • SilverZone — every paper

    Registration closes 31 August 2026 · all five subjects

    The body publishes this date but has not marked it final — confirm with your school before treating it as fixed.

  • SOF IEO (English)

    If your school picks 30 September 2026, registration closes 31 August 2026 · English

  • SOF IMO (Maths)

    If your school picks 23 October 2026, registration closes 23 September 2026 · Maths

Get the full calendar on WhatsApp

Or read the full calendar on the site — no sign-up

Every deadline in this box was checked against that exam body's own website on 24 August 2026. Bodies do move dates — we re-check every Monday.

Exam pattern

How the IEO paper is structured

SectionQuestionsMarks per questionSection total
Word and Structure Knowledge30130
Reading10110
Spoken and Written Expression515
Achievers Section5315
Total50 questions60 marks · 60 minutes

Two things in this table decide how a family should spend the next month. First, Word and Structure Knowledge alone is 30 of the 50 questions — grammar and vocabulary are half the paper by count and half the marks, and no part of that is reading. Second, the Achievers Section is 5 questions at 3 marks: a tenth of the questions carrying a quarter of the marks, and SOF describes it as higher-order thinking built on Sections 1 to 3 rather than on extra topics, so it rewards depth on the same material and not a wider syllabus. SOF publishes this table for Classes 5 to 12 — the shape does not change between Class 6, 7 and 8, only the topic list underneath it does.

SOF publishes a current-class/previous-class split for IMO and ISO and publishes none for IEO, so nothing is claimed here. Do not carry the 60/40 figure across from the maths and science guides on this site — it is a statement SOF makes about those papers and not about this one.

Syllabus

English syllabus mapped to NCERT Poorvi (Class 6, 2026-27)

Ch 1. A Bottle of Dew

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose

Ch 2. The Raven and the Fox

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — fable in verse; figurative language

Ch 3. Rama to the Rescue

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose

Ch 4. The Unlikely Best Friends

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 5. A Friend's Prayer

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry and theme

Ch 6. The Chair

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose and theme; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary and idioms

Ch 7. Neem Baba

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — dialogue and prose

Ch 8. What a Bird Thought

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry

Ch 9. Spices that Heal Us

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — informational text; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 10. Change of Heart

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 11. The Winner

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — prose

Ch 12. Yoga: A Way of Life

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — informational text; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — imperative sentences (the book's only chapter-anchored grammar topic)

Ch 13. Hamara Bharat — Incredible India!

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — descriptive text and theme; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

Ch 14. The Kites

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — poetry

Ch 15. Ila Sachani: Embroidering Dreams with Her Feet

Olympiad syllabus label: Reading (M2) — biography; Word and Structure Knowledge (M1) — vocabulary

The book above feeds one section of four, and it is not the big one. Poorvi is fifteen reading pieces, and the Reading section is 10 of 60 marks — so a child who reads well and enjoys English can still be unprepared for 50 of the marks on this paper. That is worth saying plainly because English is the subject where school performance is most often mistaken for olympiad readiness. What SOF actually names for Class 6, section by section, and where we stand on each. Section 1, Word and Structure Knowledge, lists nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, articles, conjunctions, prepositions, punctuation and jumbled words, tenses, voices, narration, spellings, collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms, synonyms and antonyms. Fourteen of those eighteen have a row in our curator taxonomy for Grade 6 English — sheet Grade6_English, the 24 rows in its "Grammar - Olympiad Scope" bucket, plus the idioms row anchored on chapter 6, "The Chair". Three are genuine gaps in our own coverage and we do not claim them: spellings, collocations and phrasal verbs. The eighteenth, "etc.", is SOF's own word and not a topic anyone can prepare. Section 2, Reading, is the one worth reading twice: SOF names news headlines, brochures, formal and informal letters, itineraries, short narratives, timetables and diary entries — five of those seven are not prose at all, and nothing in Poorvi asks a child to answer questions on a timetable or an itinerary. Our taxonomy carries unseen passages and per-chapter comprehension, which covers the narrative half and not the document half. Section 3, Spoken and Written Expression, is agreement, disagreement, requests, refusals and apologies, and the taxonomy carries a matching row. Section 4 names no topics of its own by design — SOF states it is higher-order questions drawn from Sections 1 to 3.

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Frequently asked questions

It depends on which of the two remaining dates your school picks, because SOF publishes a rule rather than a date: registrations must reach SOF 30 days before the chosen exam date. SOF's earliest 2026-27 sitting, 30 September, had a cutoff of 31 August 2026 — the earliest SOF deadline of the season — which has now passed. If your school picks 27 October the cutoff is 27 September; if it picks 17 November it is 18 October. Ask your coordinator which of those two dates they have chosen, because that single answer is the only cutoff that applies to you now.

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