year 11's and revision?

[crkm]

how much/little are your dc 's doing?

dd is year 11 with exams in a couple of weeks and i cant get her to do any revision. she spends half the day in bed and then hours washing/drying/straightening her hair then wonders downstairs aimlessly and does 'stuff' all for the rest of the day. have tried bribing her and cajoling her and getting angry and sarcastic and nothing works!! she has a future plan ie knows what she wants to do at uni and a career, so she knows these exams are vital (even the mocks) so why wont she revise? i feel bad if i dont at least try to get her to do some work. i get letters from school saying she has not handed various courseworks in, which she makes excuses for and shrugs off. i would have been mortified if my school had sent a letter home about me not handing work in!

I feel a bit sorry for kids that have their mocks in January.

We have our mocks in December - close to the end of term, but enough time for the feedback and parents' meetings. When I was at school our 'prelims' were in December, and were very important - if you needed to appeal actual exams, the prelims were the first piece of evidence (or so our teachers told us). As a teacher now, I would say that they are very important. They give an indication of how the student is doing in as realistic a situation as possible. If they don't do any revision and don't do well, it is pretty difficult to interpret the result.

I don't think any of my pupils have GCSE modules soon - definitely not in my subject. My son, who did his GCSEs last year, didn't have anything till June. If there are GCSE modules, I would expect them to be in March rather than January, although I am not an expert on every subject for every board.

What I do with my Y11 students is to give them a drop in clinic during a lunchtime and after school each week throughout the year (very low take up on this, but keeps the parents happy). In the Easter holidays, we have them in for a morning to go over the whole subject, and the same during the May half-term. We get a really good take-up for that.

I think Year 11 tutors help their students to plan their revision time, especially during holidays and in study leave.

DS is doing triple science and has "real" modules in each science in Jan. Also 2 re-sits from modules sat last May/June as he didn't get his target grades in all 3. So 5 module exams coming up and 2 hours revision todate. It's going to be a "fun" couple of weeks....

Mocks are a wake up call. I got D's E's a U and a B in mine.

Boy did I work hard after that! Got 11 GCSE's ALL at C or above. So it can be done!

dd has informed me today that she has arranged to stay late after school each day next week to get help with various subjects. Think the school thing may be the answer custardo!

cant wait for the next few months to be over and done with!!

good luck to all your year 11's - and to us who have to deal with the brats!!

AQA Science modules (the real thing) are next week.

Is your daughter a procrastinator who just doesn't quite know how to get started? Could you speak to one of her teachers to help her set up and keep to a reivision timetable for the real exams? I think that if she would agree to that in advance you could direct her to getting on with it when the time came. It would be harder to mes about and do displacement activities if she had her desk set up, chart perpared and had agreed to spend so much time each day working - and could tick off her targets as she attained them. My sons are quite organised but remember well my own mis spent youth when I just messed about doing nothing because I co;uldn't settle to work.

My Y11 DD was given Xmas homework of reading To Kill a Mocking Bird for English over the holiday period. She's about halfway through it but it makes me smile when she moans about having to do 'her reading'... if someone 'ordered' me to read a whole novel I'd think I'd won the lottery.