How much Y9 revision for assessments

[in2dagroove]

DS has been strongly advised to revise all subjects during Easter break to prepare for mid May assessments which will be used to decide his tier GCSE groups. How much revision should he be doing? I said an hour a day , 1 subject each day, but DH says double that?

Oh dear, my year 9 is freewheeling this holiday...(local comp)

Is your school a grammar or private? Or just a really switched on comp?

My year 10 is doing 1 1/2 hours of revision over Easter, every day. Exams start 1st May. I thought it’s better he’s doing active revision rather than 4 hours of pretending to do it as I used to! He’s also doing 15 mins of Maths each day too.

Have there been topic tests throughout the year, and has proper revision been done for those? If so there will be a good foundation.
Surely some subjects will need more work than others according to how hard your DC finds each subject and the amount of work covered. I wouldn't have thought much would be covered in an hour per subject. How many subjects are being examined?
How much does your DC think needs to be done?

Dd1 in year 9 is doing around 2-3 hours a day on average, but she has had/will have the odd day out.

My y9 DD's end of y9 exams aren't until June.
Ideally I'd like her to do 2hrs a day over the June half term, in practice I'll be delighted if she does 1-1.5 hours. I don't know what subjects they will be having exams in, but I will only fuss about revising subjects continuing to GCSE. If she is tested on all maths and all y9 science then both of those could easily use 1hr each per day before you even start mentioning anything else.

Sweat

Noob

Hi Karenjane, are you a y9 kid?

Thanks for all your replies, very helpful

Except you Karenjane 😂

I get super X about this.
As long as DS doesn't move sets, then the damn assessments mean very little to him (or me).
Every yr the school does song & dance about their internal assessments, & every yr I tell DS just to keep up with the homework but otherwise over my dead body should he spend his hols revising for the damn internal assessments. He can/should concentrate on the actually meaningful exams (he is actually finishing a GCSE this yr, yr10, exams in May).

Grrrrrrrr.

lljkk I agree that the assessments themselves mean little, but for DD2 at least (who struggles academically) it means there is a time to:

• practice revision techniques
• consolidate core learning for maths, & skills for English
• start learning the GCSE science

My DS didn't do much in Y9

This year, Y10, he's doing 2 hours a day. Exams start next week.

For my kids, there is no legit basis for hours they "should be" preparing for the assessments. Me & DH (& maybe DC3) enjoyed revision routine, so we would have revised. DD get anxious which is highly unhealthy, but oh well, she compulsively revises. There's no reason for any of my kids to get uptight about the assessments, yet promoting anxiety seems to be the school strategy when they frequently send home 5 page single space letters about revision & the upcoming assessments. Those letters cannot change procrastinators or lazy kids into dutiful or anxious types.

And for what it's worth, I admire my procrastinator kid. He's got a skill I lack which is producing good results at short notice & under intense pressure.

My Y7 and Y9 children have been doing about an hour or so a day over the break - half working on assigned projects and the other half on revision.

I agree that revision shouldn't really be about time - X amount of time revising doesn't automatically mean anything about the results at the end, doubling it doesn't really mean someone will do twice as well. Currently, we're trying out different revision techniques to see what works well for them and setting the habits - just like we have time for doing housework and do what needs to be done during that time, there is time for learning work.

My Y9 child really liked the revision ideas from which is essentially a way to log when and how well studying went to make it easier to prioritize what to do next. My son started with using it for Maths and English (his favourite and least favourite subjects) and is slowly building it up across other subjects. Ali Abdaal, the guy in the video, has a few other revision techniques videos as well that have gone down well here and lots of others that show techniques and how to manage revision time. At Y9, learning how to manage that time becomes more important, I think.