Priorities for October

Priorities for October

As the first month of school is almost done, we need to now look ahead to how we can start preparing for those all important science exams coming in the summer. Yes, now really is the time to start planning!

1. Diagnosis, Therapy, Testing

Log onto the VIP zone on the school website and download the B1, C1 and P1 student overviews. The username and password have been given to you, but can also be found on the SMH activity for this blog post.

Diagnosis: Use your student overviews to make an honest judgement of how well you know each aspect of the course, (progress checks and class tests can help with this), and then target your revision on the lowest scored items first!

Therapy: Having identified areas of weakness, improve your knowledge using interactive quizzes and questions on Kerboodle, knowledge PowerPoints and tests on the CRL, or revision guides and workbooks.

Testing: Having improved your knowledge, use past paper questions to test yourself. If you can successfully answer the test questions, go back to diagnosis and move onto the next area of weakness. If not, go back to therapy and re-test yourself. 

2. Use the diagnosis part of DTT to help inform your revision timetable

Start now! Draw up a revision timetable for the B1, C1 and P1 units from now until the summer exams. Use the student overviews and plan to cover areas of weakness first. It may be that it takes, for example, two to three weeks to fully understand and get pasts the testing stage for the reflex arc, but only a few days to get past energy transfer by heating - and that's ok!

Use a template which shows each day separately. Your revision needs to be specific, so make sure you indicate which part of a unit you are covering; "B1 Reflex arc" is much better than simply "B1".

Plan from now until the December mock exams. You may wish to include all subjects on one timetable, but if you find this overwhelming then try making one for "science" and a separate one for all other subjects.

Have this ready in two weeks' time to show me in lesson. Highlight biology in green, please!

You can download the templates for revision timetables here.

3. Use your school email address to post below:

Miss Cooney, Mr Shah and myself will now keep this blog updates with revision techniques, common exam mistakes and topic areas which will be decided by you. Comment on this post to let us know which biology, chemistry and physics topics you'd like us to start with.

e.g "Hi Miss, this is ______. Biology: Drugs, Chemistry: Fractional distillation, Physics: Waves. Thanks Miss, see you Monday. You are the most awesomest biology teacher ever etcetc".

Remember - we are here to help you! Good luck :)