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Official SpringBoard Writing Practice

Free SpringBoard® English writing practice aligned to a variety of skills addressed through SpringBoard Grades 6-8, with immediate feedback for students and progress reports for you. Additional tools for SpringBoard Grades 9-10 and Grades 11-12 as well! Find out more below.

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Sentence-Level Writing Practice

Identify which sentence-level skills your students need to practice with a skills survey. Then, assign activities recommended for each student based on their responses so they can practice and improve their proficiency with those skills.

Springboard Writing Skills Surveys

SpringBoard Writing Skills Survey

For SpringBoard 6-8
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Students complete a 25 item survey to gauge their understanding of key writing skills, fundamental grammatical elements, common editing mistakes, and compound/complex sentence constructions. The skills addressed in this survey are aligned to the grammar instruction featured in the SpringBoard Language and Writer’s Craft and Language Checkpoint lesson components.

Skills

Subject-verb agreement; pronoun-antecedent agreement; compound subjects, objects and predicates; coordinating conjunctions in compound sentences; subordinating conjunctions; prepositional phrases; verb tense; subject and object pronouns; commonly confused words

Pre-AP and AP Writing Skills Surveys

Pre-AP Writing Skills Survey 1: Basic of Sentence Patterns

For SpringBoard 9-10
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Students complete a 12 item survey their understanding of key writing skills, fundamental grammatical elements, and compound/complex sentence constructions. The skills addressed in this survey are aligned to the Pre-AP English High School Course Framework for English 1 and English 2.

Skills

Subject-verb agreement; pronoun-antecedent agreement; compound subjects, objects and predicates; coordinating conjunctions in compound sentences; subordinating conjunctions

Pre-AP Writing Skills Survey 2: Tools for Sentence Expansion

For SpringBoard 9-10
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Students complete a 12 item survey their understanding of key writing skills, focusing on constructions for expanding sentences with description and detail. The skills addressed in this survey are aligned to the Pre-AP English High School Course Framework for English 1 and English 2.

Skills

Conjunctive adverbs; appositive phrases; relative clauses; participial phrases; parallel structure

AP Writing Skills Survey

For SpringBoard 11-12
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Students complete a 17 item survey to gauge their understanding of key writing skills that are essential to successful AP- and SAT-level writing.

Skills

Complex Sentences; relative clauses; appositive phrases; participial phrases; parallel structure; compound-complex sentences; advanced combining

ELL Writing Skills Surveys

If you have ELLs in your courses, you may want to consider assigning them an ELL Skills Surveys before assigning them a writing skills survey.

ELL Starter Skills Survey

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ELL students complete a 22 item survey to gauge their mastery of foundational English grammar. This survey is most appropriate for students who are in the Entering or Emerging WIDA levels. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to five activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Simple verb conjugation; articles; simple subject-verb agreement; simple word order; singular and plural nouns; adjective placement

ELL Intermediate Skills Survey

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ELL students complete a 23 item survey to gauge their mastery of English grammar. This survey is most appropriate for students who are in the Emerging or Developing WIDA levels. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to six activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Subject-verb agreement; singular possessive nouns; possessive pronouns; prepositions; future tense; articles; intermediate questions

ELL Advanced Skills Survey

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ELL students complete a 23 item survey to gauge their mastery of English grammar, specifically in areas that are challenging for non-native English speakers. This survey is most appropriate for students who are in the Developing or Expanding WIDA levels. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to five activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains a series of activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice with one of the skills covered by the survey.

Skills

Regular and irregular past tense; progressive tenses; phrasal verbs; choosing between prepositions; responding to questions; commonly confused words

A list of writing concepts: Subject-Verb Agreement, Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement, Compound Subjects, Objects, Predicates, and more.

Personalized Recommendations

After your students complete a SpringBoard 6-8, Pre-AP, AP, or ELL writing skills survey, Quill will use the results to recommend a set of independent practice activities. You can choose to assign all the practice at once, or you can pick and choose the activities that best fit your instructional and students’ needs. As students complete the practice, they’ll receive instant feedback on their writing that guides them through the revising and editing process.

Writing with Targeted Feedback

Students receive immediate feedback that guides them through the revision process, pushing them to think critically about their writing and make revisions that ultimately lead to strong, sophisticated, and grammatically accurate sentences. The feedback inspires students to strengthen their sentence structure, but also supports them in editing for mechanics such as punctuation and spelling.

A recommended activity pack report showing four students being recommended a mixture of activities for relative clauses and parallel structure.
An illustration showing a student combining two sentences, getting feedback from Quill, and then getting a correct response.

Data Reports

You can monitor the progress of your students and continue to identify areas of need and areas of strength through multiple data reports. Use the analysis report to review your students' work sentence-by-sentence, or use the summary report to get a high-level sense of where your students could use some extra support.

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Passage-Aligned Activities

Twenty custom sentence-combining activities, each one aligned to a unique 9th grade SpringBoard ELA text to give your students the opportunity to practice their sentence construction skills in context.

Passage-Aligned Activities

Quill and College Board have partnered to provide students with meaningful practice of their sentence-level writing skills.

Message from College Board

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Teaching writing is hard. Even harder can be attempting to pinpoint exactly when we learned how and why to write clearly. That's why the College Board has worked with Quill.org to ensure that this new, free, comprehensive offering helps students practice targeted sentence construction skills in their writing. Sustained practice and exposure to targeted skills is important to improvement and comfort.

Teaching writing may always be hard, but student practice in meaningful skills can make the learning that much clearer. Through this practice, students can begin to own the how and why of their writing.

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Questions and Answers

Quill is a writing tool that provides over 600 writing, grammar, and proofreading activities designed to engage students in the writing process. Quill provides practice in many areas of sentence writing, from comma placement and subject-verb agreement to the use of conjunctions to convey complex relationships between ideas. In the Quill Connect tool, students practice writing different types of sentences using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining. Students receive specific, targeted feedback on their writing that they can use to revise their work. Through these activities, students practice writing a variety of sophisticated sentences and practice conveying complex ideas in clear, succinct, and grammatically strong ways. Most activities are designed to be completed in 10-15 minutes so that you have the freedom to use them in the way that works best for your classroom.

As part of the customized offering for SpringBoard, there are a variety of writing skills surveys to be used, depending on the context of your classes and students. The skills featured as part of each survey are derived directly from the elements of grammar called out by course texts and frameworks.

You can use these skills surveys during the course to assess your students' needs and to generate a sequence of recommended activities that provides targeted writing practice on the skills addressed instructionally. In each of these recommended practice activities, students receive immediate feedback on their writing that they can use to revise their responses up to five times. Through these rounds of feedback and revision, students practice key writing skills.

In addition to the skills surveys and recommended practice activities, there are also sentence combining activities aligned to texts that appear in the instructional materials of both the Pre-AP English I course Grade 9 SpringBoard English Language Arts: English I. These activities provide additional opportunities for students to practice their writing in context, combining sentences with a variety of skills and approaches that explore key ideas and themes from these texts.

Teachers generally begin by having students complete a writing skills survey during class time. The practice that is recommended once students complete a survey can be completed by students independently and at their own pace, or can also be completed during class time. Some teachers ask students to complete recommended activities during a “Do Now,” during another portion of class time, or as homework. Since SpringBoard's Language and Writer's Craft elements of activities feature focused practice on specific grammatical skills, you may also find that there are Quill Lessons (Quill's whole-class instructional tool) that can support your instruction.

Of course, this customized offering for SpringBoard has been designed to empower you to make the best decisions for your classroom and your students. Knowledge of your students' needs will assist you in making appropriate decisions.

It is recommended that you and your students create free accounts on Quill.org. Creating an account will give you access to the two skills surveys and recommended practice; creating an account also allows you to track your students' progress and view data reports. You can create an account by visiting the Quill sign-up page.

Please note that if you do not create an account, you will not be able to use the skills surveys, access the recommended skills practice, track student progress, or view data reports.

Quill's writing skills surveys can be used in lieu of Quill's general diagnostics. For example, a 7th grade SpringBoard ELA teacher would likely assign the SpringBoard Writing Skills Survey in lieu of the Starter or Intermediate Diagnostic. Keep in mind, however, that teachers may want ELL students in Pre-AP, AP, or SpringBoard classes to begin with one of the ELL Diagnostics instead of a writing skills survey. This article explains the differences between Quill's various diagnostics and surveys in more depth.

Most recommended packs contain between 4 and 7 activities, each of which are designed to take between 10 and 15 minutes.

You can assign all the recommended packs in one click, or you can pick and choose, revisiting the recommendations report to assign more packs as needed.

In general, we've found that students make progress when they are completing 2-4 activities on Quill per week. Since each recommended pack contains between 4 and 7 activities, teachers generally expect a recommended pack to be completed in 1-2 weeks. Of course, students may need more or less time depending on the amount of activities in the pack, their level of difficulty, and students' level of proficiency.

This article explains how you can use deadlines to help students pace themselves.

Quill has a variety of reports to help you track your students' performance and progress. In the Activity Summary report, you can quickly see which activities your students have completed, along with color-coded icons indicating proficiency. Quill has several other reports as well. This cheat sheet shows you which report to go to for particular information, and this video will walk you through 3 of Quill's student data reports.

If you create a free account on Quill.org, you will be able to assign additional activities from any of Quill's 5 tools:

  • Quill Connect

    Students combine multiple ideas into a single sentence using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining. Students receive instant feedback. *Note*: All activities recommended based on survey results are in Quill Connect.

  • Quill Grammar

    Students practice basic grammar skills, from using correct capitalization to correcting commonly confused words.

  • Quill Proofreader

    Students practice editing skills by correcting errors in passages. Students receive personalized follow-up activities based on their results.

  • Quill Lessons

    Teachers lead whole-class writing instruction. Teachers control interactive slides that contain a mini-lesson and guided practice. Teachers can model writing strategies in real-time, present prompts to which students can respond, and then anonymously display student responses for discussion. Each Quill Lessons activity provides a lesson plan, writing prompts, discussion topics, and a follow-up independent practice activity. Teachers can also customize any lesson.

  • Quill Diagnostic

    Students complete an activity designed to help teachers determine which skills students need to work on. After students complete a Quill Diagnostic activity, Quill recommends writing activities for students based on their results. Note: The writing skills surveys can be used in lieu of general Quill diagnostics.

Unfortunately, at this time, there are no sentence combining activities aligned to texts in SpringBoard ELA courses other than SpringBoard ELA Grade 9. If you would like to see activities like these for another course, please us know here!

We are here for you! The following resources are available:

Quill Instructional Coach: You can reach out to us atpd@quill.org. Be sure to mention the course(s) you teach.

Teacher Center: The place to go for all things best practice and implementation!

Support: Having a technical issue? Email support@quill.org or use the chat in the lower right corner of Quill to connect with a member of the Quill support team.

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