Year 8 end of year exams

[Everhopeful]

DD is not great at revision. I have been gently trying to get her to do some, since the exams are now only a fortnight away, but without wrecking her holiday. I would expect reasonable performance as long as she looks at everything she's done this year, since she's got a fair memory. DH is of the view that she'll fail everything unless she spends a lot of time on revising and that will mean she drops down the sets enough to end up with the "wrong" exams (and probably a higher proportion of the more maladjusted at her school). I tend to feel it's Y8, not GCSE and she's got enough work ahead of her, but he feels I'm being too optimistic. What's the view out there?

Oh and if anyone's got ideas on how to help them revise, please share!

How right your Dh is depends on the school.
The one my ds goes too has quite a lot of movement between sets, so your Dd wouldn't necessarily find herself stuck in a too low set forever.

However the school values effort over ability and students cant move up a set without being seen to work hard.

If Ds was in your Dds position id be pointing out that its easier to revise a bit now and keep their current place than spend most of year 9 having to work hard to try to claw their way back up. (That would be enough to convince Ds who prefers the easy route!).

Good point var 123 - though the thought did occur to me that if she got some comeback in Y8 for not working hard enough, she would take it a lot more seriously later, when it really matters. I'll put it to her and see what she says.

Your DH's attitude sounds rather harsh or maybe I would view a school has unpleasantly harsh if that's how they operated. How is she generally doing, is she comfortable in the sets where she is or does she have to work hard to stay there?

DD is a grafter & can't help but revise, DS is lazy & never revised, both are in best sets for each of them.

In accumulative subjects (Maths, MFL) this would be a good opportunity to make sure she understands everything that has been covered since the beginning of Y7 and address any gaps. This will help her confidence going forward.
Maths: she could practise some questions.
MFL: she could test herself on vocabulary words & phrases.

In topic-based subjects, it would be a good idea to review what she has done this year.
She could draw some mind-maps, explain concepts to you, or whatever works for her.

DS2 is in Y8, and has done the following revision so far this half-term holiday:
Monday: 20 minutes of French (vocabulary)
Tuesday: 30 minutes of English (poetry analysis & comparison)
Wednesday: 40 minutes of Science (past KS3 SATs questions)

I have a Y8 and I just leave her to it. I don't know if she has exams but if she does I doubt they're very high level. I wouldn't stress.

I think the method Molio suggests can work very well for some children, especially those with good organisational skills and a high level of self-motivation. DS3 falls in this category.

My other three children need a bit more support with their learning (due to additional needs or other issues). If I just leave them to it, they start to feel overwhelmed and stressed. They are all making progress towards being independent learners, with the help of strategies and organisational skills I have taught them at home.

DS1 is currently revising for end of Y10 exams almost independently and has done one GCSE paper. In his case, it took three summers of practise and support to get to this stage.

Yes I think this particular DC is well equipped. I used the same approach with all previous DC but perhaps could have been more interventionist, looking back. Not much help!

You are setting the pattern for how she will revise, and the attitude she will take to exams in the coming years. Children who's parents push them at this stage do far better in the end. parental involvement in revision and encouragement actually has a far greater influence than the school or the teaching.

Charis that might be an overstatement. I've known kids pushed at this stage who lose the will to work. It tires them out rather than enthuses them. Nothing is universal, it will all depend on the attitude of parent and child.

Fully agree with Charis, I've spent today marking year 8 exams and you can really tell who revised and who didn't. Parental support and encouragement is crucial, really placing value on their effort and sacrifice to revise will pay dividends later at GCSE.

Unless they burn out Beauregard. I've known families insist on runs around a field every morning before school and all sorts of odd dictats about 'silent revision'. Really, it can be pushed too far. I'd far rather be under pushy then over pushy in the grand scheme of things. Also, can you really tell which kids have revised of their own volition and which have been shadowed by parents? And if so how?

DD is in Year 9 and similarly to your DD, has a strangely short attention span when it comes to revising. But we are trying to help her practise for when GCSEs come as if she can't revise now, she's got a lot of work to do in a few years. We allow her to meet up with friends but she has to do a little revision most days. I also tried to make it fun for her. She has made posters and flashcards and it's like a quiz between her and DH.

Hmm, I've been musing about this. Ds is in Y8 at a fairly academic school (selective) and is doing ok but not brilliantly. But then the ones who are doing brilliantly are probably brilliant, which, with the best will in the world, he is not, although he is well within the schools "ambit". So he sort of needs to keep his eye on his own game and do the best he can. Its not about setting for us, as they only set for a few subjects and in any event he is probably in the right ones for him already.

I definitely agree that you are laying down patterns now for future summers of work up to GCSE and beyond. DS seems to have revision sheets for each subject. He does not have much of a reasonable idea how to marshal his time and actually work, though, and given any option at all would be very happy to spend the time on the X-box, whatapp'ing his mates and watching old episodes of Top Gear.

This is what we have done. At the beginning of the half term we sat down, looked at what he had for every subject, printed it up if necessary, and put it all in a file. That was a very good 2 hours work (for me as well as for him!). He now can easily read now exactly what he is going to be tested on and needs to look at.

We agreed that he would do 2 hours of revision a day, split into 2 x 1 hour sessions, split into 30 mins, 10-15 mins break, then another 30 mins. We also have a quick tick list to check which subjects he has done, to make sure nothing gets left out. But he chooses what he is doing each day, and he also chooses when to do the work. I've not looked at what he is actually doing, nor have I tested him etc - all I have done is worked with him to set a framework so that we actually know the work is getting done.

I'm at work, but the spy in the camp (younger DC!) tells me he is sitting there for the alloted time. I have no idea what he is actually doing but I think I've struck a good balance between a good framework/providing support and spoon feeding or whatever. If the exams go badly or not as well as expected, we can say "what do we need to change to that regime to make it work better". (My other DC will be able to set all this up by themself as they are much better organised but DS isn't and he really needs this input).

Sonorousbip that is exactly what I did with ds1 when he sat his year 8 exams recently. It worked well in that it made the amount of work feel do-able.
The only 2 flies in the ointment were caused by 2 nqt teachers who gave revision lists of things that hadn't been done in class, or had been covered in year 7. So ds spent a lot of time researching these and then they weren't in the exam.

The key question - did it work?!!

I have no idea if he has covered everything, although he hasn't squeaked about that, which I sort of assume he would. There is one subject where he has not got a revision sheet though, which sort of surprises me when he has them for every other subject - my finger of blames is pointing more to DS than Mrs GeographyTeacher on that one!

It worked! 3 positive outcomes:

• good results
• Ds1 learned how to prepare for exams
• I found out what he finds easy/ what he doesn't get

On the last point I was surprised to learn that French is not taughtviaverb tables anymore. So Ds struggling with simple stuff like is and are. So I got him to memorise enter and avoid and both came upon the exam ( unsurprisingly).

Sorry for typos. On phone and autocorrect in overdrive!

Etre and avoir

Thanks for all your input, people (var123 - your phone: arf!)

It has helped quite a bit: I think DD does need help organising and it will stand her in good stead for the future, so I have helped with that. I found a couple of downloads that she agreed were useful, DH helped her get set up today - and she did work through her book for a while, then decided to make a couple of posters for topics she finds tricky. He wasn't too impressed, but I was blown away by her cooperation, which was very unexpected given earlier conversations! I'm hoping she'll do it again tomorrow and Sunday (not that convinced she won't take Saturday off as she is very rigid about Not Working On Saturday) and that we can get her to do it all next week too.

I look forward to the results, as she is generally quite able - sort of B+/A- level overall. Time management is a huge issue much of the time, so I've been going overboard with the positive feedback for the effort she's made today. I worry as she has had some periods of depression before already and I'm personally dreading the build-up to the GCSEs. I think I'll get her to sort out her revision timetable before Easter next year!

My DDs went to boarding school and I had no input into exams at all! They did well so some children don't need huge parental input at exam time. They do need encouragement and high expectations though.

I took the opposite approach this year with very lazy/disorganised dd2 (13) and backed right off. Exam grades coming in now (from last week) and the results are pretty mediocre - all about a grade lower than she'd be capable of if she'd worked.

I did this for a few different reasons - mainly tbh because her older sister is currently sitting GCSEs with an anxiety disorder and I didn't want to add to the already horrible levels of angst and stress in our house - particuarly as dd2 has also had brushes with depression. I could have "made her work", but only after massive arguments and possible at the cost of our good relationship and the good communication that's keeping us going at the moment. But now we know what she does (feck all) when left to "get on with it", and she's seen the difference between working and not working in all her subjects. So it's been a useful exercise! If she doesn't develop better self-motivation next year, we'll be right on top of her once the GCSE courses start.

The thing with Ds1 is he buries his head in the sand when exams are coming up.

The school starts reminding with a month to go. The teachers mention their exam every lesson for the last fortnight. However, despite all this, Ds1 still seems to manage to pretend to himself that they are a long way off and he'll start revising "later".

In year 7, he kept that up until the Friday evening before the exams were due to to start on the following Monday morning. Then, in exasperation, I told him that I was making the decisions now about what he'd be doing hour by hour for the weekend. I thought he'd feel emasculated, but he just seemed relieved.

my mum always let me revise as much or as little as I thought I needed, then she would "test" me. Not in a horrible way, we'd both sit together with a cup of tea and she'd ask questions (orally) that I should reasonable know on the subject. She would also ask me to expand on certain issues (like history topics).

This helped me get decent grades. It was sympathetically done, I never felt she was trying to catch me out, but more that she wanted to make sure I grasped the basic concepts and there were no glaring holes in my subject knowledge.

I would love to be able to do this with my DC, oldest only Y7 and has not yet had much serious revision to do (other than maths, which is capable and willing to do by himself).

Does anyone else take this approach?