How to prep for the SAT while taking a shower

Teens who plan to prep for college-admissions tests this summer can find a plethora of ways to make it fun and flexible.

Want to study in the shower? Lose yourself in a comic book? Take a quiz on your iPod? Or how about rocking out to some songs that stretch the lyrics just a tad in order to be educational?

Test-prep giant Kaplan has paired up with publisher TOKYOPOP to offer a series of manga novels (Japanese-style comics). Released earlier this month, each of three popular stories was rewritten to include more than 300 words commonly tested on the SAT and ACT. (Cost: $9.99.)

"Van Von Hunter" stars a raven-haired hero who vanquishes evil in the land of Dikay. In just the first few pages, you'll find words like "inviolable," "nefarious," and "subvert." Underlined words are de­­fined in a box on the same page.

"By having the combination of the visual story and the words popping out on the page, students can ... really retain the words, versus just memorizing a list," says Kristen Campbell, Kaplan's national director of SAT and ACT programs in New York. With librarians and even classroom teachers tapping into this popular genre, she says, it made sense to add it to the test-prep options.

With iPods becoming ubiquitous, last month Kaplan started offering downloads to prep for the reading, math, and writing portions of the tests (at $4.99 each). The audio/video segments include strategy sessions and customizable quizzes.

If you'd rather stick to more entertaining options for your ears, plenty of music CDs can make those tough-to-remember definitions sink in.

Vocabulary Accelerator, by Defined Mind Inc. in New York, serves up rock, hip-hop, and R&B songs on a CD with a workbook of related exercises (www.defmind.com, $25 for the set). One ninth-grade teacher reported that after just a few weeks of incorporating the program into her lessons, her class's average score on vocabulary quizzes went up from 40 to 84 percent.

Joel Heckethorn taught with Vocabulary Accelerator last year in his 10th-grade English class at Eagle Academy for Young Men, a small public school in New York City. His students started asking him to play the CD in the background while they worked on vocabulary and writing assignments, and soon they could spot the words in such literature as Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart."

"I put [many assignments] in the same format that's on the SAT, so they would be familiar with it," Mr. Heckethorn says. "It's something I didn't have in high school ... but I certainly wish I had."

Teenagers, of course, can see through adults' attempts to make learning cool, but the efforts seem to pay off anyway. "My first impression was that the songs were a little corny, but when you listen ... you can understand how they actually use the words in actual conversation," says Ryan Moore, a student of Heckethorn's. "I was always sure that I was going to take the SAT, but I never knew how I could study for the writing part, and the [Vocabulary] Accelerator helped me out a lot."

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