Year 7 Revision help!!

[SouriHound]

Posting in AIBU for traffic, apologies.

Ds is in year 7 and has exams coming up in 2 weeks time. Despite my nagging, he hasn't revised very much at all for his exams. He's got pretty good grades on his in year tests but I am worried as these end of year exams can contain any material from year 7 he may not do so well without having revised thoroughly.

Please, could you share your top tips for quick and efficient revision, any and all tips will help so much!

He is a very enthusiastic learner in the classroom but at home, mills about, looks at status updates of friends on his phone and mopes but doesn't revise!!. How can I get him to revise?

Don't make him revise, natural consequences.
Also one of the biggest indicators for good grades/progress is quality time with family, he's year 7 let him play with his brother or his mates.

He's year 7. Let him enjoy his holidays if he's Bern working hard at school.

one of the biggest indicators for good grades/progress is quality time with family

Not heard that before. Can you evidence that? and I wish someone had told my struggling DD, she's have been on grades 7-9

Use Quizlet to make flash cards. Free, online and you can set it to do random tests and retest.

My DC used it from GCSE onwards and swear by it

Go on bitesize, Quizlet, kahoot or any other online site, they do short quizzes, relevant to the topics learnt.

@anothermansmother

I suspect the correlation there is that DC who spend quality time with family will tend to be in more mc homes where revision is supported and expected.

I agree that Y7 is not the most important year and that it is important to encourage independence but, at the same time, most kids don't instinctively know how to revise at that age, unless they've had parents/grandparents (or maybe teachers in the family) who may have showed them along the way, maybe even at primary.

I understand that most indies have end-of-year exams which are a bit more formal and an expectation that kids will revise whereas some state schools might not.

Perhaps ask your DC to find out if there are revision lists/check lifts for the various subjects, then make sure that that class notes are read and perhaps some supplementary reading from the text book before making flash cards or mind maps (my DC prefer mind maps).

BBC Bitesize for KS3 is good at this stage to get an idea of the key topics for each subjects and there are revision material and mini-tests which are helpful.

If it is of any help, my eldest was exactly the same; we left him to it and he did do very much worse in the end-of-year exams but seems to be more focused now; I think they teach revision techniques etc formally in Y9/10.

Good luck!

I agree that learning good revision techniques early on is very important. My two comments are that some kind of activity is the best way to do it - write something out, draw a diagram or picture of something you may need to reproduce in the exam or some
online resources are good for this but just staring at a page doesn’t get it in. Also, in terms of topics, it is a fact that to do well in many exams you don’t need to know the whole syllabus - it is OK to
select certain things to concentrate on. Of course this depends on the format of the exam - short answers or essay? On from each of several sections? etc. Has DS been told anything about this in any of his subjects? Can he access any comparable past papers? These are the kind of things I was doing at O level (dates me), A level, university though so may not all be possible at year 7 but worth a shot and I would have thought his teachers would be impressed if he asked about things like what format the exam will take if it has not already been discussed.