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.
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 5 September 2026 · all five subjects
SOF IMO (Maths)
If your school picks 23 October 2026, registration closes 23 September 2026 · Maths
SOF IEO (English)
If your school picks 27 October 2026, registration closes 27 September 2026 · English
SilverZone — every paper
Registration closes 30 September 2026 · all five subjects
The body publishes this date but has not marked it final — confirm with your school before treating it as fixed.
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 2 September 2026. Bodies do move dates — we re-check every Monday.
Exam pattern
How the IEO paper is structured
| Section | Questions | Marks per question | Section total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word and Structure Knowledge | 30 | 1 | 30 |
| Reading | 10 | 1 | 10 |
| Spoken and Written Expression | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| Achievers Section | 5 | 3 | 15 |
| Total | 50 questions | — | 60 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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Or see every 2026-27 exam date and registration cutoff in one table, or browse all the papers we cover.
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