GCSEs 2018 (11) Big week coming up

[mmzz]

old thread

Thank you Terf and slinkyme
Boys all quiet now but DD (also Y9) is slamming doors for some reason known only to her.

Third Thankfully I have a one and only but I have vivid memories of sibling fallouts with my brother/sister...

Good luck to everyone - must remember to set alarm DD has been with her DF since last Friday so I have been having a lie in ..

Thanks for all the insight and advice on the music gcse. Definitely something we will explore for DS when the time is right. Nite all.

The ebacc is fairly irrelevant to DD'S school. There are two school locally. One typically gets over 70% with 5 GCSEs at A* to C, the other around 30% to 40%. One has a national park as half it's catchment area, the other has a large chunk of industrial estates in it's catchment area. They can both take around 250 p.a. One has a long waiting list due to its outstanding Ofsted, the other takes around 150 p.a. due to is reputation and a recent stabbing. Probably sums up the pointlessness of ebacc for a fair swathe of the country.

History cramming tonight chez panda. If she can pull the facts out of the air she is really good at applying them, but not sure she has enough hard information committed to memory! So frustrating...

Best wishes to all for maths tomorrow. Xx

Dds dad remembered to text her tonight to wish her good luck. He's redeeming himself after forgetting she had GCSEs for the first week. He's normally pretty good so I think it was a genuine oversight that he got the wrong date but really brought it home to me how much I'm living every minute of the exams and he's barely aware of them.

Anyway I thought I'd pass on his parental advice to all your DC: "Don't forget your calculator!"

Feedback from my solitary Ancient Historian was ‘The questions were fine but the exam was too short. What happened to a mark a minute? I can’t write fast enough for 84 marks in 75 minutes.’

She also said she ‘managed to get rebuke, extant and minutiae shoehorned into it’ so she is hoping at least for some SPAG marks.

On to maths we go. Good luck all.

DS3 was abandoned tonight as DS2 and I went to our monthly pub quiz. Out of 17 teams, we won! DS2 very satisfied. His ideal job would be an Egghead.

Ancient History sounds like fun. Is that a private school, Kitties?

Calculator ready here!

Good luck to all in exams today!

Teenmum the maths papers were so useful. Thank you.

Ellen congrats on the pub quiz win!

Seems like an age since DS's last exam (12 days ago). Hope he can get back in the swing for maths this morning. Good luck to all.

Thethird I can really relate to your post. I feel sorry for all four of you.
Sometimes crying is just a release of tension. I am hoping that is what happened to your DS1.

I have a DS in year 9 too. He is thoroughly fed up living in a home where DS1 is the priority because he has an exam. My fear is that in two years time, when DS2 is doing his GCSEs, my interest will have moved on to A levels and university choices and I'll not give DS2 anything like the amount of support and interest that I've shown DS1. I'm already guilty of that over the year 9 exams. I may have started something that I can't finish!

Good luck to all the DC today.

DD will be ok today if there is a sequence to do something with in the paper of 0, 15, 30, 40...tennis over ran and she was on court for 2 1/2 hours. Back to my stock phrase of "as long as you feel you've done enough, couldn't do more and won't regret it in a few weeks."

DS1 said yesterdays Business was ok. Whatever that means

Maths today.

He was at football training last night with 2 of his friends from school. While they were waiting for their parents they were chatting about todays Maths exam (EDEXCEL).

Their Maths teachers have all said as the first paper was so straightforward they expect this one and the next one to be "nasty".

DS is leaving now to go in for a Maths Wake Up session.

Good luck today everyone!

mmzz and third it's so hard balancing the needs of a bigger family when some of them have big stuff going on.

4 DC here and when they were small we would all go to park, swimming, eat spaghetti, whatever. It was a bit tricky with taking a tired youngest out to collect sublings from a club or asking oldest to wait while I put baby to bed but mostly it was happy chaos.

This year they have been doing uni finals, looking for jobs, GCSEs, y7 exams. If I help one with a job application then I'm not helping someone with homework. It does feel like there aren't enough hours in the day.

The DC are bright and sassy and have different combinations of dyslexia/ADHD/ASD so do really henefit from "scaffolding" to help them be organised and keep stress levels down (a bit).

During GCSEs I'm only in work 2 days a week and DH is taking those days off. It's the only way I can manage. I've got bloody got flushes and sleep badly. Grrr.

Sorry long

DH whispered sweet nothings to me in bed last night: quadratic formula, area of a trapezium, sine rule, cosine rule

Good luck to all the DC and old codgers sitting exams today.

Changebags that made me laugh!
Good Luck to all today,
And don't forget your calculator!!!

Maths today......🙈🙈

English and History tomorrow ((ds thinks his hand might fall off))

God, no, not a private school, Ellen! It’s a normal good-ish comprehensive that had a very keen classical history teacher, sadly now moved elsewhere. Dd would have liked to take ‘history plus ancient history’ at gcse and forget the maths and physics, but she’ll have to suffer the sine rule and Newton’s laws for a few more weeks.

calzone - DS has the same exams tomorrow.

He has been complaining all week about his hand falling off on Friday.

Or even worse being too tired to bat with said hand on Sunday

Hmm, thought she’d left, but I’ve just been to sort out the wail of ‘Muu-um, you know that spare protractor we have somewhere?’

DH is going to drive her in.

kittieDVD would have loved to do ancient history! She is as good at history as she is geography ( expected to get a 9) but chose not to do history GCSE which really upset history teacher, because she wanted to do ancient history where her heart lay. She opted for art which she hates!

At least dgd a bit upbeat today. Says usual I will try my best and I hope not too many circular theroms to do.