Practicing exam responses and testing knowledge using past or sample exam papers is an EXCELLENT way for students to prepare for exams.
And if they don’t know where to find these, my GTZ Members can find quick links to all the state exam boards, their past papers, mark schemes or chief examiner reports in the Grade Transformation Zone Member Area 🙂
However, it can be a pretty intense exam prep activity, and when your teen’s feeling exhausted, perhaps mid-exam-block, BUT they still *need* to be doing some productive work to prepare, then here’s an alternative, slightly ‘lighter’ way to tackle this.
And just quickly – I can’t take credit for this. I got the idea from Steve Collis who, at the time was the Director of Innovation at SCIL – the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning, and he once said ‘if you can’t sketch it in crayons, you don’t understand it’.
It wasn’t meant to be a profound statement, but it struck a chord with me and so here’s one of the ways I took this and made it into a practical strategy….
Instead of writing a formal full answer to each question on the practice exam paper, have your teen try to draw a response. This can be fun, but also pretty challenging (in a more light-hearted way)!
But it’s that extra challenge that makes it really effective 😉
Because the fact that your teen is having to convert their knowledge from text format into a visual form, means that their brain is doing an extra step of processing of that information. And more processing means more retention AND easier, faster retrieval when it comes to getting that info back out, from brain to paper in the exam hall.
Plus, it highlights any knowledge gaps. Because you can’t sketch something you don’t know or understand.
Now, a quick ‘Captain Obvious’ note here – obviously this is not something to do IN the REAL exam – this is just a suggestion for revision and exam prep, when they need a bit of a break from the really hard core revision, but still want to or need to be productive.
Ok, that’s the disclaimer done 😉
Scroll down and leave me a comment to let me know if your teen fancies giving this a go!
And until next week, let’s make this a fantastic week!
