SAT

Why Nurturing Wisdom?

Prepping for the SAT with a Nurturing Wisdom tutor will result in more than an improved SAT score. With a strong tutor match, your child will be an engaged, dedicated, and confident learner. This work will pay off on school work and elsewhere, too!

We want you to feel supported during this process as well! Your tutoring director will create an optimal timeline, update you on progress, alert you to important deadlines, and answer any questions you have along the way.

Our Approach to the SAT

Students who are unfamiliar with the SAT may find it daunting, but we'll break it down to manageable parts so that they can tackle it one step at a time! To help students perform to their best ability, we address four core competencies in our SAT tutoring: test taking strategies, academic skills, test anxiety, and timing. A weakness in any of these areas will inhibit a student from earning their best score. For example, they may have their math strategies and skills down pat, but then have anxiety or timing issues derail their performance on the test.

An added bonus: addressing these four competencies through SAT tutoring has a direct impact on a student's work in their academic classes. We regularly hear about students getting better grades after they've started SAT tutoring. They master skills, approach quizzes and tests differently, and develop a growth mindset. The tools they pick up through SAT prep will serve them well for the rest of high school and beyond!

SAT Test Sections

We extend this approach to our work on each section of the SAT:

• Writing and Language: For this section, we teach practical punctuation, agreement, and word choice strategies, as well as introducing hands-on strategies for the informational graphics questions.
• Math: On the math section, seemingly simple math concepts can be cloaked in abstract language and difficult question formats. To address this challenge, our SAT tutors focus first on teaching key math skills and then teach explicit strategies for deconstructing the tricky question formats.
• Reading: On the reading section, our SAT tutors teach a combination of active reading and question answering strategies. They then help students apply those strategies to the challenging and varied passage types that appear on the exam.

Starting in the spring of 2024, the SAT will change to a digital format.

Testing Accommodations

Nurturing Wisdom has successfully worked with hundreds of students who have testing accommodations! Our tutors are experts in how to support students with accommodations such as extended time, multiple day testing, a reader, a writer, or other alternate test formats.

Getting Started

All students begin by taking an SAT pre-test. After the pre-test is complete, we'll put together a tutoring timeline outlining how much tutoring we recommend, goal scores, and which test dates we recommend preparing for.

Sign up for one of our proctored pre-tests, a great opportunity to get a feel for the real test day. If you're unable to make a proctored test date, you can take a free practice pre-test on your own!

When to Start

Our goal is to find the right time for your child to prepare for the test. Does your son perform in the spring musical each year? If so, it's probably best to start in the summer before junior year. Does your daughter play soccer? Then it's best to start SAT prep after the season wraps up. We typically start preparing students for the SAT the summer before their junior year, but we have started working with students as early as 10th grade. We have also worked with students as late as first semester of senior year.

Online Tutoring

If you live outside of the Chicagoland area, we can still help! We love working one-on-one with students online to help them achieve their goals. Contact us to learn more!