Official Pre-AP English Practice
Free Pre-AP® English writing practice aligned to the Pre-AP English High School Course Framework for the English 1 and English 2 courses with immediate feedback for students and progress reports for you.
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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.
Pre-AP Writing Skills Surveys
Students complete a 12 item survey their understanding of key writing skills, fundamental grammatical elements, and compound/complex sentence constructions. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to five activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains four to six activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice on one of the five skills addressed in the survey.
Skills
Subject-verb agreement; pronoun-antecedent agreement; compound subjects, objects and predicates; coordinating conjunctions in compound sentences; subordinating conjunctions
Students complete a 12 item survey their understanding of key writing skills, focusing on constructions for expanding sentences with description and detail. After students complete the survey, Quill will automatically recommend up to five activity packs for each student based on their needs. Each pack contains four to six activities that each take about 15 minutes to complete and provide scaffolded, sequenced practice on one of the five skills addressed in the survey.
Skills
Conjunctive adverbs; appositive phrases; relative clauses; participial phrases; parallel structure
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
ViewELL 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
ViewELL 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
ViewELL 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
Writing Practice Aligned to Course Frameworks
Each 12 item Pre-AP Writing Skills Survey covers five of the ten key grammar skills from the English 1 and English 2 course frameworks. Each survey helps identify which of the five skills your students need to practice most.
Personalized Recommendations
After your students complete a Pre-AP 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.
Additional Practice
Some of your students may benefit from more opportunities to practice a skill after they have completed the activities recommended based on their writing skills survey results. In that case, you can assign a second set of independent practice activities: same skills, new content. Learn more about the additional activity packs.
Passage-Aligned Activities
20 custom sentence-combining activities, each one aligned to a unique Pre-AP English 1 text to give your students the opportunity to practice their sentence construction skills in context.
Passage-Aligned Activities
Alignment to Pre-AP English 1 Content
Each sentence-combining activity is aligned to a different text from the four English 1 instructional units. As students combine sentences and build their writing skills, they also explore key text elements: historical and authorial context, plot, structure, and more. These activities model the kind of analytical thinking they would optimally reflect in their own writing.
Alignment to Pre-AP English High School Course Framework
In these sentence-combining items, students are free to use any grammatically correct method of combining the sentences they choose. However, each item is written to provide opportunities for students to practice the skills from the course framework. No matter which method students choose to use, they will receive instant, targeted feedback on up to five revisions to help them strengthen their sentence and build their writing skills.
Opportunities Throughout the Course
At least one activity appears in each Learning Cycle of all four instructional units so that this sentence-combining practice can easily be incorporated into your instructional plans. Since these activities include details about the texts and analysis of key elements, they are best used to reinforce learning after students have read and discussed these texts in class.
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.
