Early, Organic, SAT Prep for Homeschoolers

My 11 year old son just took the SAT in June.

He managed to score 1270 (560 verbal, 710 math)

I want to tell you how my wife and I “prepared” him for that but first I want to reveal to you some important secrets about SAT preparation that you won’t hear very often, if at all.

Speed It Up

It’s a SPEED test. You know it’s timed, but few people emphasize speed when talking about exam prep. The math material is not hard at all, however the best math students have time to go back, check their answers, and even buckle down on the few questions they might be stuck on because they are lightning fast. When I took the SAT way back in the Stone Age, I could finish and triple-check a 25 minute math section in only about 11 minutes. That’s how quickly this caliber of questions can be answered when adequately prepared.

The same goes for the verbal (“Critical Reading”) section. The students who do well are able to read the passages significantly faster, and of course with better comprehension, than the lower scorers. But I’ve never heard anyone, instructor or not, acknowledge this. Nor have I heard anyone talk about how to cultivate speed in readers.

So why isn’t speed recognized as THE most important factor? Well, I have a friend who works for one of the biggest SAT/ACT prep firms in the world and he told me that the very first thing they told him in training was:

“You are not there to teach the kids content….they come with whatever they already know….your job is to teach them the tricks.”

How depressing! First of all, the overriding priority for an instructor should be to educate. Second, those tricks not only suffer from diminishing returns – i.e. they won’t help a top student go from 700 up to a perfect 800 on a section, they will be utterly useless for the student later in college classes and life for that matter.

Sadly, there’s truth in the pragmatism of SAT prep companies. At 16 and 17 years old it’s not very easy to significantly improve the knowledge or speed and therefore the scores of SAT or ACT test-takers.

How to Accelerate

The secret to getting fast at math is very simple – start early and do a lot of math. By early, I mean by 4 years old. My son started doing the Kumon math books, on our kitchen table, after breakfast, every single day when he was 3.625 years old. Any parent, nanny, deputized older sibling, or grandparent can do this – I mean we are talking about writing numbers, adding and subtracting 1 and 2, etc. Such a daily regimen, over time, will generate powerful learning momentum and of course, rapid results. Here he is at age 6, deriving the quadratic formula:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swIyaHm87YM?rel=0&w=640&h=480]

After working with hundreds of students, both homeschooled, schooled, and including many math geniuses…it’s become 100% clear to me that when it comes to math, the best and most-squandered opportunity to accelerate is between the ages of 4-10. And that’s a whole lot of time!

Reading speed

My son reads at least twice as fast as me, if not faster. For years my wife and I have been in disbelief that he is actually reading and not skimming. Yet whenever we quiz him on a book he will invariably not merely answer correctly, but give answers quoting passages in the book VERBATIM.

Apparently extreme reading speed, according to child acceleration pioneer Dr. Glenn Doman, comes from prolific, early reading. When I came across that it all made sense because John (and his younger sister who is also a speed-reading demon) have read thousands of books.

How we got our kids to read so prolifically, well, that would have to be covered in another article. (Hint – ZERO television!)

The larger point is, if you want your child to crush the SAT, it’s really important to get a head start and make sure they read tons of books while very young, one way or another.

Reading does so many wonderful things. It not only increases core knowledge, but it also lengthens attention span and expands vocabularies like nothing else. Apparently books, even children’s books, have 9 times as many rare words as everyday conversation.

So notwithstanding that vocab book pictured above and a little bit of Dr. Chung’s wonderful SAT math book, this was the extent of the formal prep – early, rigorous math and voluminous reading both of which I highly recommend.

I advise my clients to invest time, energy, discipline, and money when children are very young. Because only then is it possible and easy to significantly alter learning trajectories.

One final supporting note from 2 of the richest men on Earth:

If you could pick one superpower, which would you choose? …When a student at Nebraska State asked Bill Gates and Warren Buffet the superpower question, Gates answered, “Being able to read super fast.” And Buffett echoed him, adding, “I’ve probably wasted 10 years reading slowly.”

 

~Dan