Ways to Practice

To continue developing your understanding of a unit’s skills and essential knowledge, you and your team need lots of PRACTICE. To give yourselves this necessary practice, you should select some combination of the activities below:

    1. Watch and discuss relevant videos in AP Classroom and on YouTube.
    2. Practice rhetorical analysis by studying the “visual rhetoric” of images, such as advertisements, political cartoons, and photographs.
    3. Select a text (perhaps one related to the theme of your current unit’s anchor text) that your team wants to read, highlight, annotate, and discuss for some specific curricular purpose(s). Ask Mr. Simone to create the text (e.g., in hard copy, in a Google Doc, in Perusall). You can also ask Mr. Simone to confer with team members about their reading—individually and/or as a group.
    4. To assess your team’s understanding of a unit’s skills and essential knowledge, ask Mr. Simone to create a quiz using “Topic Questions” in our AP Classroom.
      1. Since you and your teammates are likely to pace yourselves differently, consider completing a quiz for homework, that way you and your team can spend your class time comparing HOW you selected your responses and discussing WHY the wrong answers are wrong, especially if the reasons are subtle and unnoticed by one or more of your teammates. If your team needs clarification, ask Mr. Simone.
      2. To practice working under timed conditions (like most standardized assessments, including AP exams and the SAT), you and your team might also consider completing a quiz within a certain amount of time, which you can choose.
    5. Read, Write, Compare, and Contrast
      1. Begin by identifying a text that your team would like to read.
      2. Next, read and write about this text individually. As a team, decide in advance what your writing should accomplish: you could simply summarize the text’s main ideas or argument, or you could more fully analyze the text’s rhetoric.
      3. Once you’ve all finished writing, you and your teammates read each other’s writing and then have a conversation about how similarly and differently you read and wrote about the selected text.
      4. Remember: Your ability to understand what you read and hear, and to express yourself in writing and in speech, will always depend on your knowledge of words. So, as part of this exercise, be sure to note at least some of the unfamiliar vocabulary and study them in some way. For example, it’s very easy to create a list and practice it in Vocabulary.com.
    6. Select a prompt that your team wants to write about for some specific curricular purpose(s). For example, many of the AP argument questions include a quotation by a famous person, and your essential task is to respond to this quotation by arguing how, and to what extent, you agree or disagree with it. To practice this task, you could use any of the Dictation quotations. Ask Mr. Simone to provide any required documents or materials. You can also ask Mr. Simone to confer with team members about their writing—individually and/or as a group.
    7. As a team, select a past AP Free-Response Question (FRQ), compose individual responses to this prompt, then compare them to student samples.
      1. Set aside 40 uninterrupted minutes and compose your individual responses to one of the Free-Response Questions (FRQs) on past AP Language exams. (You’ll find descriptions of—and links to—these FRQs here.)
      2. Once you’ve all written your responses, you can evaluate them by comparing them to three different student samples, as well as the College Board’s scoring commentary for each.
      3. Remember: Your ability to understand what you read and hear, and to express yourself in writing and in speech, will always depend on your knowledge of words. So, as part of this exercise, be sure to note at least some of the unfamiliar vocabulary and study them in some way. For example, it’s very easy to create a list and practice it in Vocabulary.com.
    8. As a team, select a past AP Free-Response Question (FRQ), compose individual responses to this prompt, then evaluate/score each other’s essays.
      1. Set aside 40 uninterrupted minutes and compose your individual responses to one of the Free-Response Questions (FRQs) on past AP Language exams. (You’ll find descriptions of—and links to—these FRQs here.)
      2. Once you’ve all written your responses, you can discuss and evaluate them using the AP Language scoring rubrics.
      3. Remember: Your ability to understand what you read and hear, and to express yourself in writing and in speech, will always depend on your knowledge of words. So, as part of this exercise, be sure to note at least some of the unfamiliar vocabulary and study them in some way. For example, it’s very easy to create a list and practice it in Vocabulary.com.
    9. To more globally assess your team’s understanding of the AP Language curriculum, ask Mr. Simone to create a practice AP exam (in part or in full). As you approach exam day, you and your team should consider taking the practice exam in our textbook (pp. 601-634). Here is the answer key.

Please note: We will continue to add to this menu of options!

HOW TO BEGIN