Effective secondary revision methods - school revision tools are crap? Ideas

[skygroundsky]

Hello! my year 9 child's school seems to set all homework and revision as online stuff. E.g. Seneca for science, sparks maths for maths etc.

My feeling for when it comes to exams especially the information doesn't seem to sink in when they are working constantly online.

We don't even have our own hard copy text books to work from - everything is on a screen.

My child even refused to write notes by hand when I encouraged them!

Does anyone else have similar feelings, and if so, how do you encourage your children to revise better / more effectively?

Good old fashioned pen and paper? Test papers, printed and filled in? Flash cards?

I personally feel it's quite short sighted of the school.

Just started year 9 is still quite young, if taking exams in year 11, they will only just be starting the texts/content in most cases? and there are a mix of online resources depending on working style. Lots of YouTube video walkthroughs of different exam boards. You can buy your own revision books if your child learns like that. Both my DCs have different learning styles, one liked coloured note cards, mind maps & books the other hated those preferred doing past papers over and over to embed knowledge online. You can’t make them but can help facilitate options if required.

many schools are going paperless. I have worked in a couple of schools where everything is done on chromebooks. Students have very little need to pick up a pen. In fact us teachers hardly pick up pens either these days :( My kids school had access to text books online and if you wanted you could order a physical copy for your child. I of course ordered them but the kids preferred using the online version.

I tutor science up to GCSE and find that most students dont have physical books and turn up for lessons without pen and paper!

Ex maths teacher.

honestly the best revision method for maths is doing questions from a past paper and then looking up the answers to the stuff you didn’t understand.

flashcards etc are of limited value here it’s about doing the questions.

sparks is actually pretty good on this as it gives you instant right/wrong and will give you videos on how to do it if you are not sure.

as your child gets closer to gcse past papers are the way to go but they won’t have learnt a lot of the topics yet. You can also get workbooks of questions by topic but again these are largely for year 11.

Build their own summary cards as they go along and start to condense near to the exams. Lots of YouTube on it

Past papers. All. The. Way

Writing notes is not an effective revision method.

The very best way to revise is by doing practice questions and ‘interleaving’ topics. Sparx etc. is excellent for this. DS1 is Y9 and managed to get 100% in his science assessment last year just by doing his Sparx Science every week.

Sparks is good but for me past papers or old fashion revision books are also one of the best methods.

DD had revision books as it also did the topic itself in smaller chunks so she could refresh her knowledge before doing the questions.

Sparks is hated in this house!

DS1 likes past papers.
DS2 is looking like a mind map reviser. That said, I doubt he'll be revising much maths. Not sure what he'll do with that at A'level as im not sure mind maps and maths are the best combination.

Spark has just got my non confident Dd a 7 in her maths GCSE. She didn't have the patience to read books about things she wasn't interested in but the instant result with Sparks was fun and helped enormously and the fact she could do it in bitesize chunks was good. Nothing is worse than a long revision session but 15 mins every day is easy.