Official SpringBoard Writing Practice

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.

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.

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.

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

Quill Instructional Coach: You can reach out to us at[email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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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