It looks it would be easier to go through The Little Schemer first before pick up SICP, so here we go.

atom is the most basic building block, it could be a letter, a string of digits, a string of characters. Examples:

a
1492
atom
*abc$

list is one or more atom enclosed by parentheses. Examples:

(atom)
(atom turkey or)
((atom turkey) or)

All atoms and all lists are S-expressions. For example, there are three S-expressions in the following example :

(((how) are) ((you) (doing so)) far)

They are ((how) are),((you) (doing so)) and far.

The null S-expression:

()