As a high school English teacher, I’ve spent over ten years preparing my students for the SAT and AP tests. I believe it’s crucial to provide test preparation during instructional time to ensure access and equity for my students.
In the past ten years, I’ve developed my own SAT prep and AP resources for 9th and 10th grade honors, AP Language, and AP Literature. When I design materials, I have a central goal in mind: improve my students’ inference-based reading skills. I’ve seen so many of my students struggle with this portion of the SAT and AP tests.
I first began looking at short passages to share with my students. I was amazed by how impactful these short passages were on raising my students’ scores. Best of all, the passages challenged my students: my students have had a 93% pass rate with these SAT and AP resources.
For my 9th grade students who often need a scaffolded approach to get to junior year, I’ve created modified resources, as well. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde proved to be the perfect resource for scaffolding as it’s a concise text that’s easy to implement. My 9th grade students were able to understand what skills they would need for the AP and SAT tests. Their feedback reflected its success. As one of my 9th grade Honors students shared with me, “I’ve never had to think like this before.”
The growing bundle of resources includes the following materials:
- 200+ inference-based multiple choice questions which are passage-based
- Accompanying passages with line numbers for easy formatting (except for the texts with asterisks below; for these, I’ve included the chapters and page numbers for reference)
- Analysis exercises
- A poetic devices scavenger hunt
- Writing tasks for the texts below:
- A Christmas Carol
- A Farewell to Arms
- Animal Farm
- Lord of the Flies
- Macbeth
- Romeo and Juliet (rooted in *Kate Danley’s Queen Mab) – developed for Honors Grade 9/Pre-AP
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Grapes of Wrath
- The Great Gatsby
- The Odyssey (rooted in *Madeline Miller’s Circe) – developed for Honors Grade 9/Pre-AP
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (complete unit of AP/SAT prep with questions for every chapter and 2 versions of a quiz)
- The Scarlet Letter
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
Learn more about this resource here.
What strategies do you use to prepare your students for the SAT and AP tests?
