How to Supercharge your Half Term!
Ah February Half term, haven’t really had a break since Christmas, a week off time to chill, watch movies catch up with series and sleep all day :). . . er no!
The February Half term provides a golden opportunity to test, and refine your studying technique before it gets too close to exam time to make much of a difference.
There are three main areas I’m going to be concentrating on and giving tips for each. They are planning, implementation and assessment. Note that it would be a stretch to expect all you revision to be completed by the end of the February half time but it can set you up nicely and allow you to collect key personal studying data for the final few weeks before study leave and exam period begins.
I like to think of exams like a boxing match and if you follow boxing you will know that boxers go into what is called training camp, which is a place where they isolate themselves and work with their team to intensly prepare for their fight and get into peak physical condition. They can spend three months before the fight in training camp, and guess how long most of you have before exams start? You guessed it about three months.
Planning
If you’re going to make the most of half term it’s very important that you plan, a great house, or your favourite movie didn’t just happen by itself, somebody looked beyond the present and prepared for it.
- Planning can be done on two different levels
What you plan to get done by the end of the week and what you plan to get done in an individual day, the latter feeds into former. Use applications like Google calendar on web or your phone or even what I’ve started doing going back to good old pen and paper to visually see how your week will pan out, make sure to stay on task and focused you know what you should be doing at every part of the day and decrease the options you have to make.
Planning is great but I would advise you plan enough to know what you are doing everyday but make it flexible enough that if something takes longer than planned, which it almost definitely will!
- Traffic Light System
But before you even plan you have to make an accurate assessment of where you are, you may be doing really well or you may need to cover a lot of the content.For this I developed the traffic light system, so you can visually see where you should be investing your time.
Red signifies it hasn’t been done or when tested, there were gaps in your knowledge. Yellow means there is more work to be done and green means you have a good understanding and have scored over 90% when tested. If you produce this before half term starts you can allocate the time necessary to your weaker subjects and avoid comfort revision (when you relearn something you know very well and neglect the subjects you don’t know as well).
- The Relevant Resources
What are you going to be learning from? Before you can even work you need to make sure you have, all the textbooks, the handouts, past papers etc. when getting a textbook, there are a few guidelines you should follow.
Your textbook needs to go in enough detail that you know everything in your specification in enough detail to do well in your exam, A textbook is not the same thing as a revision guide! As a rule of thumb when buying text books I only buy books that I could learn the whole syllabus from without attending a single class (but of course we wouldn’t do that!)
Secondly you should get the textbook made by the people that will be examining you or have been endorsed by the exam board, for example most students in the UK sit the Maths Gcse that is assessed by edexcel. It is therefore a good idea get the maths text book produced by edexcel. However they are not always the best for a particular subject so look at a few books for your particular course before you decide on one.
- Location
A quiet clean environment is important for effective studying, spend some time before Half term tidying your space, if you don’t have access to a space where you can work or your house is more busy than usual over half term, you may then want to use your local library, or another quiet public space. So planning where you are going to spend your studying time during the week is something you must consider.
- Other work & commitments
You may also have other homework that needs to be completed along with revision, it’s advisable that you incorporate your revision into this, therefore you end up completing your homework and revise the relevant topic at the same time. If you have other commitments like family functions or chores, put these into your calendar to so you work round it and see how much time you have.
Implementation
Routine and consistency are gonna be how you win if you’re going to be the best student you can be you have to make good decisions a lot of the time. The goal when studying is to get to the stage where, you’re focused and learning effectively and you know the information you’re reading is being processed. This is called flow state, and all the tips below are to help you get to flow state more quickly.
- Sleeping and rising routine
Your body clock is likely to be accustomed to your waking hours when you attend school or university, you can use this to your advantage and keep this consistency.Get up early, maybe slightly later than on a school day but still early once you’ve done work before lunch you will be motivated to complete work after lunch and finish your goals. Don’t punish your body, go to bed at a sensible time to make sure you have enough rest, you learn a lot better when you’re not tired.
- Having trouble starting?
If you’re struggling to start working in the day start off small with just 25 minutes using the pomodoro technique, get rid of all possible distractions like your phone or social media, you may even want to divide your day into pomodoro segments and test to see if this works.
It’s important to understand there will come when you won’t feel like studying and doing work you have to push past this and get used to doing things you know are right but you don’t feel like doing. This is a character really successful people have. Eventually it will become a habit to study and work consistently and you will see drastic results when you get to this stage.
- How are you learning?
How effective are your methods? This is the time to really test what works for you, and change if necessary, I started effectively using the Cornell method towards the end of my degree, I do wish I had invested more time in identifying the best way for me to learn earlier.
Supplement your learning by writing down the things you don’t understand, that you can look up or ask teacher/lecturer when you are back.
Assessment
It’s very important to evaluate where you are after covering topic, do you understand it completely? If not it’s important to recognize it because you won’t do very well when tested on it.
Best way to see if you understand a topic is to test your knowledge by answering questions or teaching somebody else.
- Practice papers
Use practice papers past papers (save a lot for when you get closer to the exams), if you don’t have any test papers available there will usually be end of chapter questions on the topic you have just covered so you can use these as exam questions. There are some practice papers available from a lot of the major exam board websites, with mark schemes (but don’t do them all at once) Recreate test conditions, using the correct amount of time allowed and silence so you get an accurate picture of how you would do if you took the test today. Websites such as Goconqur will help you produce your own practice papers and other resources.
- How well do you know your notes?
To supplement questions. Are you able to write your notes out without looking? Only using the heading as a guide.When you are able to do this you will at least know you remember the content very well.
- Rest/High density fun
Having Rest and doing other things are also very important, but what we tend to focus too much time on this aspect, my advice would be to do enough work that you require a rest, don’t kid yourself you will know when you have exerted yourself,rests feel much better when you’ve actually done something.
Make time for fun activities, it creates balance and gives you something to look forward to and creates some artificial pressure which helps you work faster and be more attentive, which is important because if you give yourself a lot of time to do a task you will take the all the time, but artificial pressure means you give yourself a deadline to complete work.
So by the end of Half term you should feel that you’ve achieved a lot and feel really motivated for the next half term, if done correctly, by the time you arrive at Easter it should be pure revision, not learning but revision. You will already know what works, and what’s effective so you you can sprint down the Easter home stretch and into exam season, where those top marks and First class honours are waiting.
So good luck, have a fun and productive half term. Let me know how useful these tips are.
let me know if there are other techniques you use to make the most out of your holiday time!
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