Exams and Revision

Hello there,

I'm currently sat in what seems like a sea of revision notes, post-its, books, and random pieces of paper. I know it's not really exam 'season' yet for most people but I have a couple of exams coming up this month and we are getting closer to the spring/summer exams!:(. I never really knew how to properly revise and stay organised so I thought I'd make a post on the helpful tips I discovered when trying to revise for my exams last summer.

Tip 1.: Lists!

I find it it helpful to start off by making lists a few months before the exam of topics I need to revise/ go over if I didn't really understand them in class. I try to keep these lists as simple as possible and use them as a sort of tick sheet as I go along. I think this is a good way to stay on track throughout the month or so I spend revising.

Tip 2: Time-Table!

I am a massive procrastinator and if twitter is staring me in the face, I am likely to leave all my revision until late at night. Obviously this isn't a good thing at all so I started disciplining myself (oh yeah) and made a time-table of revision, e.g maybe on Monday night I would revise Spanish for two hours and Tuesday night I would revise one hour Biology and one hour Geography. It really depends on what you have going on though and how busy your weeks are. I allow myself one week day off (usually Wednesday to break the week up a bit) and I also don't do much, if any revision on the weekend. I personally feel then like I have to get my revision done if it has been written down, so it's like forcing myself into not backing out of it.

Tip 3: Notebooks/ Binders!

I lose almost everything. Take last results day for example, I went to Starbucks after collecting my sheet of results from school but then lost my results! I spent ages re-tracing my steps and the ended up being on the pavement... This is why keeping my revision notes safe is essential to me! I invested in some ring-binders a couple of months ago and started separating my notes by subject into each of the binders. I then used sticky tabs to separate my notes into topics and modules. I'm now in year 11 and we have a lot more exams this year and I don't really have the storage space for 12 ring-binders! So I decided to buy (well my mum bought it) a Pukka-Pad notebook with dividers from Amazon. The style I have has 250 pages and 5 dividers which are different shades of blue and green (I love colours!) I have found that a couple of these notebooks along with my binders from last year are enough to keep my notes organised and safe.

    

Tip 4: A3 Coloured Paper!

This may sound a bit odd but I thought that A4 sheets of paper didn't really have enough room for mind maps so I bought a pad of A3 paper from Hobby Craft. It was quite cheap at £2.00 and was a lot more practical for big mind maps.

Tip 5: Markers!

This may be a bit cliche but colour definitely makes revision more fun in my opinion! I love using markers for mind-maps and notes as they make me more likely to remember certain points if they look interesting (sometimes changing to a different colour pen was the most exciting part of my evening). Sharpies are my favorite although any markers will do! I also like to use the Sharpies to write the subjects on to my binders.     

      

This post may be a bit nerdy but I hope at least one person finds one of my tips helpful! 

Bye for now!