Written by Charlotte, Year 11
On Thursday 2nd March, Year 11 took part in two workshops run by ‘Made’ to help with revision techniques.
The first workshop was ‘Exams Made Easy’. We came up with reasons we wanted good grades this summer. Answers ranged from A Level choices to careers we want in the future. We talked about how to motivate ourselves – reasons for wanting success being the most prevalent.
We moved on to discuss some interesting revision techniques, for example ‘number words’ – creating sentences using words with the same number of letters as a year you need to remember – and ‘memory palaces’ – picturing a room you know well and thinking of a ‘trigger’ linking to the information to help you recall it at a later date. These techniques were new to most and the majority felt like they helped when asked to recall new information we had been given. We went through how to use flashcards effectively – writing questions on one side and concise answers often with pictures on the other. We found this useful as we all agreed we feel we can write too much on flashcards.
The second workshop was ‘Marginal Gains’. We spent time talking about how small improvements can build up and become larger improvements, whether this was in moving up from a grade 6 to 7 in our GCSEs or an everyday habit we want to change. We made notes on what things we feel will affect us during our GCSEs ranging from getting enough sleep to doing enough revision. We rated how well we thought we were doing in these things and what we plan to do to help them improve. It was useful to think about these things now as we were told that habits take at least 3 weeks to become automatic, meaning these habits will hopefully be automatic by the time we are doing our exams.
