This class is taught in English.

Getting into Harvard or Stanford and the other Ivy League schools requires straight As and over 1500 on the SATs. Still, there will be thousands who apply that have these for only a few thousand spots. Standing out means that you have leadership and exemplify character in addition to the highest grades and highest SAT scores. These 3 are the focus of the Summer Harvard Prep program.

I'll focus on the following skills: work ethic, study skills, organization, and critical thinking. Specific SAT preparation will zero in on what is included in 77% of the SAT: reading, comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, and writing. For achieving the highest grades in school, I'll have students identify their top 4 core classes for next year, and we will get a jump on these classes for the fall.

For leadership development and character building, I will have students identify a disenfranchised group and build a plan to launch a club at school, church, or community center. This is the type of leadership that means they will stand out above the crowd with the highest GPA and SAT scores in line for admissions at Harvard or Stanford. These schools are looking for these qualities for their alumni who will represent the school in the strongest manner.

Qualifications for Teaching This Class
•	ten years of College nonprofit work: mentoring, tutoring, classes on leadership training, academic coaching, and classes on preparing for occupational success. These classes included students attending UCLA, USC, Caltech, Pepperdine, UCI, and others.
•	Fifteen years’ work with High School students tutoring, leading classes on leadership development, mentoring their work with those less fortunate, academic planning, SAT classes/tutoring, career planning, goal setting, study skill classes/tutoring, academic counseling. This included students who went on to attend UCLA, USC, Harvard, Stanford, Biola, Seattle Pacific, Berkley, and many others.
•	Three years teaching classes on Outschool with more than 2200 students teaching College Prep reading, Critical Thinking, SAT exam prep, and Financial Education courses focused on navigating college into a successful career.

I've been a teacher all my life. I earned a Master's degree in theology from Biola University, including many classes focusing on teaching, communication, philosophy, and practical mentoring of students (and adults). I worked in the nonprofit sector for more than 20 years. I am a lifelong student and a late bloomer academically. Both my parents are retired University Professors, and I grew up in a "Sound of Music" family. I homeschooled my two sons for six years, and they have grown to become wonderful men, husbands, and fathers. I've led several CEO mentoring and reading groups. Truth, beauty, and goodness are focus topics for everything I do in life.

Homework Offered
We will focus on skill the following skill development. 
1. Reading (SAT Prep)
2. Writing (SAT Prep)
3. Grammar and vocabulary (SAT Prep)
4. Reading comprehension (SAT Prep)
5. Personal study skills, organization
6. Problem-solving
7. Critical thinking
8. Leadership development
9. Character development - focusing on helping those who are less fortunate
10. Advance work on four major subjects for the fall (students/parents need to inquire and provide specific subjects and categories of study for the subject)
2 - 4 hours per week outside of class
Assessments Offered
Grades Offered

Please pick up the “Kallis SAT Pattern Strategy” book.

Reading will cover six books over the summer. Students will pick these from a College Prep book list (below). Three will be read, and three will be watched in a movie. I’m fine with an audiobook. I want students to get a jump on understanding the content and story of these books. We will work through major themes and a method from Mortimer Adler’s book, How to Read a Book. 

Selected Reading list
Students will pick six from the College Prep book list. Three will be read, and three will be watched in a movie.

Middle School Book List
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/recommended-college-bound/

Author	Title
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O’Neill, Eugene	Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Poe, Edgar Allen	Selected Tales
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver’s Travels
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Wright, Richard	Native Son

Sr High School Book List
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/recommended-college-bound/

Author	Title
——-	Beowulf
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austin, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Dante	Inferno
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll’s House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
O’Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Proust, Marcel	Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse