It’s not that children (and many parents) don’t know about the following study tips, it’s good to be reminded and get significant influencers of your children (friends, teachers, grandparents to reinforce these ideas) often hearing them from mum (again) is like water off a duck’s back ! You could try to get your school to incorporate some or all of them into targets that can be followed up at a later date.
- Improved handwriting, most of the gcse coursework, exams and internal school tests still require students to write with a pen and not type. Make it easier for the examiner by having legible, neat handwriting that’s not too big or too small.
- Have a fully equipped and clean pencil-case at all times, include basic things like sharp pencils, pens that work, rubbers that are more than just a stump! But also have the appropriate calculator (a scientific one that does sines, cosines and tangents for gcse) at home and a spare one in a locker at school. Also have at home a tin of coloured pencils and pens, great for mind maps and revision notes. Glue, reinforcements (for hole punched paper), scissors, hole puncher, stapler and spare paper to hand are all very useful in helping keep everything organized.
- Tight time management is essential especially from when children return from school. Set mini goals of what needs to get done that night in the form of outputs, eg completed maths worksheet, completed English script etc. Also to start homework work during the week earlier after getting home from school rather than having a long break, starting work and then having a long break for dinner again and then going to bed too late.
- If your child doesn’t understand any aspect of a lesson then remind them to ask the teacher either in the lesson, or make a time so the teacher can explain it later, or understand it from a friend, ideally the same day or week, not to wait till revision time as there is no time to learn things from scratch.
- Make revision sheets on topics as they go along for each subject during the term. Put them in separate folders from school ones to refer to (especially useful for science) but do it smartly so time is not wasted. ie read whole topic (could be as little as 2 pages) read the questions required on it, and then figure out how to do the revision sheet, often for science it’s just getting a lot of information down in a table or a really detailed diagram so you can talk through exactly what’s going on.
- Be consistent with reading, firstly of quality newspapers on-line and choose a book and ensure the children finish it, if it’s an English coursework book or even one by the same author, then so much the better.
- Don’t underestimate the benefit of exercise, try to incorporate it into weekends and holidays, even if it’s walking (while it’s not too hot) to the shops and getting a taxi back with the shopping and even if your teen insists on walking behind you, in front of you or with their ipod in, it’s still doing you both good !
