How do you help plan revision

[notanothertest]

DS Y9 and I'm dreading another end of year exam week. Please can anyone advise how they help to plan the revision schedule. How many hours would your DC spend revising leading up to the exams. His school is very vague and just says every child is different. Do you just work from the school text books? Last year I left him to his own devices and it was a disaster - he's bright but disorganised. For anyone with a DS like mine do they eventually "get it" before GCSE or do you still need to help?

This is one of the ultimate 'you can't lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink' scenarios. With the added snare that drawing up a revision timetable can become a displacement activity instead of doing the actual revision.

The first thing to do is see if he would agree to set times when he will revise (and turn off the tech - there are 'cold turkey' apps which will block access to sites/apps for set times daily). Then go through the list of subjects: which is he doing OK on anyhow? Where does he believe he could do better? Prioritise those, and then look at the topics within them. Where did he get lower marks? Does he understand the topic now? Can he find sample questions online and do them in a set time?

Essentially, you need his active buy-in to the need to do this. What motivates him generally?

I have to admit my DD did very little (if any revision) up until Year 9 for exams - they were still getting the same amount of homework and that was enough for her! I gently reminded her that even a few minutes would be good but it made no difference.

Year 10 is a completely different matter. She's making notes as she goes along which have been put in a revision folder and highlighting work which she thinks will be good to revise/go over when it comes to revision. Also, she's looking at websites which she can understand in case some she needs to double check her understanding before finally revising.

What medirina* says.

With disorganised dyspraxic DD1, now y12, I did as follows for y10 & y11.

Went through with her each subject to list main topics. Got her to estimate how much time needed to revise each topic. Added up total time.

Discussed how much revision she thought she should do each evening and at weekends. Added up total time.

Compared the totals and adjusted/compromised.

Agreed when revision would be done (e.g. straight after school v after tea).

For a NT child that should be enough really. But for DD1 we also:

Scheduled in subject by subject into each revision slot, then before each slot agreed which topic would be addressed. We were flexible with swapping slots and topics, but made sure that no subject was being unduly neglected.

We also discussed how to do revision. Active revision - making notes or diagrams, doing practice questions, questions on BBC bitesize, is more useful than passive reading the book. Mix and match different techniques to find what works well and to alleviate boredom.
(Plus active techniques makes it easier for you to check that work has been done as there is something to show for it).

I will be expecting DS2 (Y9) to revise in the summer half term, but not much before that.

This is the approach I encourage them to take for revision:

1. Make a list of topics for each subject, then rate each topic using traffic light colours according to how confident you feel about your knowledge.
2. Count how many 'red' topics there are and how many days in the revision period, to work out the minimum number of topics to revise each day. If you are feeling keen then you can include 'amber' topics too.
3. For each topic, spend half an hour learning (flashcards, mind-maps etc) and half an hour testing yourself and doing practice questions.

Thanks everyone some really good suggestions . This weekend will sit down with him and try colour coding the subjects/topics. The sciences was where he spent all his time last year as there just seemed to be far more topics to get through and this meant running out of time for history and geography and if I'm honest most of the other subjects. I'm finding it difficult because he wants to be independent which is great but always seems to be in a muddle so I don't want to kill his motivation but it really worries me that as the subjects expand over the next couple of years unless he gets a routine for revision its going to get much worse. Splitting the time between flashcards and testing seems a better approach. I could see last year he was just re writing chunks of text which took up most of his time.