Study Skills for Year 7 & 8

On Tuesday we had Eric O’Halleran from the company Learning Performance come in to do sessions with Year 7 and 8 on revision techniques.

The sessions looked at how the brain works, how to improve your memory and gave lots of little tips to help with revision. Pupils were given some easy and some hard anagrams to work out at the beginning of the session and were asked to remember them at the end …the majority of pupils remembered the tougher ones because they had had to put in more effort to work them out. Eric explained not to feel disheartened if something is difficult to work through at the beginning as, chances are, you will remember these more clearly when you come to an exam.

Some top tips for revision:

Find a quiet area to revise which is not also an area in which you watch TV, play computer games etc as you will get distracted.
Draw up a timetable to organise your revision and plan in short breaks or treats
Always start with the things you find the most difficult then leave the things you are more confident in till last.
Be specific about your revision – e.g. don’t just say “I am going to revise Maths for the next hour” but think “I would like to go over Solving Equations, Substitution and Factorising in the next hour”.
Use colour to highlight key points (but do not go overboard with the colour as this will become confusing and could have the opposite effect of hiding the important information)
Show/write/draw the information in different formats – do not just write the same notes over and over again. Use mind maps, bullet points, diagrams to help.
For technical vocabulary try to think of words they sound like and perhaps link these to objects in the room.

Miss Harrison has added a link to the resources used in the session on the parent portal, Firefly, for your information [CLICK HERE to view]