Course Overview
Pre-AP English 1 focuses on reading, writing, and language skills that are relevant to students’ current work and essential for students' future to future high school and college coursework.
Texts take center stage, preparing students for close, critical reading and analytical writing. The course trains readers to observe small details in a text to arrive at a deeper understanding of the whole. It also trains writers to create complex sentences—building this foundational skill en-route to sophisticated, longer-form analyses.
English Areas of Focus
The areas of focus are reasoning skills that provide vertical alignment within a discipline, giving students the opportunity to develop and strengthen these skills as they progress through subsequent Pre-AP courses and into advanced coursework.
- Reading closely
- Valuing evidence
- Noticing language choices
Course Resources
Course Content
Pre-AP English 1 has four main units and five big ideas. Review their key topics and the recommended length for each unit:
- Unit 1: Telling Details (~7 weeks)
- Unit 2: Pivotal Words and Phrases (~7 weeks)
- Unit 3: Compelling Evidence (~7 weeks)
- Unit 4: Powerful Openings (~7 weeks)
These big ideas are integrated across all units:
- Engaging with texts
- Constructing texts
- Focusing on language
- Investigating through research
- Entering the conversation
Each unit contains:
- Model lessons: Student and teacher resources that demonstrate how to translate the course framework, shared principles, and areas of focus into daily instruction.
- In-lesson formative assessments: Short, open-ended problems that highlight the targeted content and skills for each lesson.
- 2 learning checkpoints: These multiple-choice and technology-enhanced questions are modeled closely after the types of questions students encounter on AP Exams and the SAT. Learning checkpoints require students to examine graphs, data, and short texts—often in authentic contexts—to respond to questions that measure students' understanding of the unit’s concepts and skills.
- 1 performance task: A sustained problem-solving task that asks students to synthesize the unit’s skills and concepts while answering questions about a novel context.
Pre-AP Course Audit
Before implementing a Pre-AP course, teachers need to complete Pre-AP Course Audit. This process is required to:
- Grant teachers access to Pre-AP Classroom, including instructional materials, professional learning, and assessment tools
- Authorize the school to use "Pre-AP" in its course names
- Include the school in Pre-AP Course Ledger