If it's your ambition to follow in the footsteps of others or otherwise just prefer the classic Lisp-haqr experience, you can use a TexInfo version of SICP and have both the text and your REPL in Emacs: http://zv.github.io/note/sicp-in-texinfo
Also, just to pimp my own ride: I put together a SICP guide for new explorers of this great text: https://github.com/zv/SICP-guile
It contains both meta-information about which dialects of Lisps and languages are most suited to SICP, overviews of subchapters, helpful hints for those who are following along at home as well as answers to the exercises in Elisp, Guile scheme & Racket.