Year 10 mocks. DC no idea how to revise.

[tearingmyflippinghairout]

Exams start next week. They’ve been talking about revising for weeks. They’ve done several timetables, none of which they’ve stuck to. They flit between watching stuff on line (using Bitesize, Seneca etc), reading stuff school face them, bits of past papers, but with no real plan or purpose. They haven’t got round to looking at huge chunks of subject matter.
We’ve tried to help, but nothing is working. I veer between being really worried and just really bloody annoyed. They think they’ll do fine, but when you go through some of the content with them it’s like it’s the first time they are ever hearing it.

They are supposedly doing fine in school. Top sets. I just don’t understand the disparity with what I see at home and what they seem to see. And that they do not seem to have taught them how to revise for exams?

So I’m thinking these exams are a write-off and we need to work out how to get them to a place where they can actually revise effectively in year 11.

Please tell me this will get better?!

I think you need to relax and take some pressure off.
Making their own flash cards helped my child. Past papers and the stuff the did in school.

See how they do in the mocks. My ds16 is at a SEN school in L6, so he got lots of support, and he didn’t do all 11 exams, etc, but I think just see how they do. If they get 100% 6-9 grades leaning more towards 7-9, be amazed at this miracle, but tell them that they wont be so lucky in their actual GCSEs. If they get lower, it will probably hit like a reality shock, and they will start revising more. Does their school not run revision workshops or something similar?

I'm feeling a bit similar at the moment - DS generally does well at school, but is quite resistant to doing much at home. And then he wants to read something quickly, and for us to test him by asking him the associated questions. He'd prefer not to look at any source material at all I think, but then I don't consider that to be revising really.

It's so stressful.

I suppose these are practice exams for a reason. I just wish DS wasn't so resistant to writing notes. Or reading them.

Honestly we’d all be happy with 4s and 5s in these, but I just can’t see how that will happen. They are going to get a HUGE reality check!

My DS was just as bad to be honest for year 10 mocks I left him to it. For the GCSEs mocks I printed of a couple of exam papers and got him to practice a few bit mainly left him to it I did step in for real exams on subjects I thought he could be doing better printing more exam papers and marking them for him. He actually did better than expected.

Flash card writing, Quizlet, reading through revision text books, talking the content over with a parent.

Try to stop blaming getting so stressed about it — revising is difficult and different things work for different people. The least successful methods are just writing out stuff again or going through and highlighting once or twice. The most successful tends to be ‘look, cover, say’ and test yourself — repetition is the core of memory. Getting cue cards and putting the most important things on there can work or you can just use the textbook.

there’s a huge amount of material to cover so there’s no surprise that they can’t remember everything they did in class.

Pick a couple of subjects and revise those 1-1. Use CGP books where they exist. Pick a page, go through it together, get him to identify key info, write it on a flash card. Then you take book and card, ask him questions and give answers until he can say the answers.
Go to next page, repeat the exercise.
Then a third page.
Now go back to page 1, has it been retained? Go over again, repeat for 2 and 3.
Then do 4, 5, 6 twice. Then back to 1.

If he's got a good memory it shouldn't be too painful and he might get the hang of it.

For science flash cards may be facts.
For history it might be mind maps.

If he can stay focused he doesn't need to keep using you and he can do saying out info and cross checking answers himself.

Then next day, and 2-3 days later start at page 1 again.

If this time round you can nail a method for 1 science and engl lit / humanity it will help moving forward.

But how has he been revising for end of topic tests? He should have a whole bank of revision cards or similar already!

By start of y11 he needs these in place imo, even if it means doing them over the summer.

I’m a tutor. For science subjects, I’m always telling pupils to concentrate on key words, and what they mean. For example, if reading biology, and they’ve forgotten what an enzyme is:

1. LOOK IT UP.
2. Write a very short definition, in their own words.
3. Write a short description of what it does, in the form “this happens, so this happens, so this happens”.

Point 3 is very useful for “explain” questions.

Labelling diagrams can be a good exercise for science vocabulary. Start with an unlabelled diagram of (for example) the digestive system, label as many parts of it as you can, each with a sentence of what the part does.

I think the key to this is writing short notes, as they are easier to remember, not the long paragraphs seen in textbooks. Writing in their own words helps cement it in their brain.

This can apply to many other subjects, such as geography. Using technical terms gets them the marks, hence the importance of knowing what they mean. For instance, what is the “common agricultural policy”? Again, write a short definition.

It is a problem that schools often don’t have time to teach pupils how to study.

If they’re in the top sets currently then I’d take a step back and see how these exams go. They’re not really mocks, those happen in Year 11 they are just end-of-year exams. I’ve been a secondary teacher for 30 years and seen three of my own through exams. They will have been given revision strategies and ideas but different things work for different students- they are a useful benchmark for teacher and student and part of the learning process.

For my DD the turning point was me booking her on some external revision courses it just seemed to make things click. I don’t think she knew how to revise before. We didn’t do this till year 11 and she turned it round (well not got the results yet but I think she has). If you can afford it and DC are compliant I really recommend this.

I've just remembered that my kids watched some really useful tiktok revision videos done by teachers.

Can't recommend the CPG books enough for GCSE, DS relied mostly on them and got all 7-9. The English ones are weaker though IMO, especially language, He used Mr Salles on youtube and we bought some of his books that were really good for ideas for English language.

That is revision surely?

Looking at past papers is helpful

And the point of mocks is that its a mock, they'll either do ok in which case they're on course for the real exams or they'll do badly, get a shock and have to devise a different way. Natural consequences.

I think there's almost too much available to them in terms of revision resources and it can be a bit overwhelming. My DS tried a few things over Y10 and 11 and gradually found what worked for him.

Definitely encourage them to stick to their timetable even if they don't seem to be using that time very effectively - for us the Y10 exams were the key stage to embed that concept of organising time (even with a very minimal timetable in our case!).

It does get better!

Can you print off some past papers AND the answers/marks schemes? It can sometime help them see where the points are awarded - eg for a 4 mark maths question there is one mark for the right answer, one for stating that it is Pythagoras theorem, one for writing it out, one for substituting the letters with the numbers. So just putting the right answer means you miss out on 3 easy marks