In a previous post, we shared details about new Freckle for ELA features that launched last spring. We’re pleased to introduce another set of enhancements to Freckle for ELA as part of our commitment to provide a comprehensive program that helps you to effectively differentiate practice at all levels.

Our goal is to provide you with tools to help you better understand what your students are practicing and how they’re performing, so you can provide appropriate support to help close skill gaps. We also want to ensure that students have access to engaging ELA practice that is both challenging and rewarding.

Read on for a discussion of what’s new.

Introducing Targeted Grammar Practice

Freckle’s new Targeted Grammar feature allows you to assign specific practice on Language/Grammar skills through ELA Skills practice.

A teacher creating a targeted (non-adaptive) grammar assignment can choose which standard and corresponding skill they would like to assign (one per assignment). As shown below, they see a preview of the questions for the available standards and associated skills before creating the assignment for students:

New Parts of Speech skills in Adaptive Grammar Practice

We’ve released 78 new skills for Adaptive Language/Grammar practice. These skills cover sentence structure and parts of speech, so students can practice parts of speech skills in the context of real sentences for grades 2–8.

In addition to multiple-choice and fix-the-sentence question types, the Parts of Speech domain presents students with a new, interactive question type that allows them to select-the-word in the context of the sentence, providing more variety in their practice.

Parts of speech are major building blocks in reading and writing. This new domain will allow students to learn and practice many parts of speech elements in an engaging format, while also saving time for teachers.

Enhancements to the ELA Report Card

You’ll see several enhancements to Freckle’s ELA Report Card:

Summary of practiced ELA standards by strand (i.e., Reading Information, Reading Literature, and Grammar) for the selected time period. When you navigate to an individual student’s report card, you’ll see a new module representing standards practiced that includes:

• Time periods
• Standards grade level filter
• Table for each strand with practice

Summary of complete and incomplete assignments. You’ll see a new module that indicates how many ELA assignments have been completed in the selected time period. The module displays the number of completed assignments out of total assigned in the time period.

Updated views of the articles read and levels. You’ll also see a new table when you select the “library reading” module that includes:

• Date read
• Article title
• Genre
• Text level (Freckle Level/ATOS)
• Accuracy
• A blue arrow to link to article report for that session
• A tooltip for the “Text level” column that explains Freckle Text Levels and links to the Freckle Text Correlation Chart

New ELA Skills learning pathways

To simplify the experience for students and ensure teachers can be confident that students are receiving the best differentiated practice at their level, we’ve updated our ELA Skills learning pathways.

Students will see a simplified experience when choosing practice in ELA Skills that helps them to understand the levels they’ve already mastered and the levels that are coming up next in their pathway. (This is very similar to their experience in Freckle’s math pathway). Teachers will also experience a streamlined process for creating these assignments, because they will no longer need to select from a long list of domains when assigning ELA skills.

The questions and skills content will remain the same, but now skills are ordered in a more robust learning pathway within each ELA domain so that students learn a mix of concepts at their just-right level.

With these enhancements, Freckle is providing an even more comprehensive ELA practice tool that meets students where they are and provides you with real-time insight into students’ performance and progress. 

Note: If you’re not currently using Freckle for ELA, you can create a free Freckle account, and your students will have access to engaging practice, helpful scaffolds, and motivating incentives this school year.