I recently created a new page ‘Revision Activities’ as I could see from my WordPress statistics that posts on revision are popular.
Time to say a little more on the first item on the revision page. I am a huge fan of Corbettmaths 5-a-day. I have been using these regularly with my Year 11 GCSE class; they like them and have come to expect these at the beginning of many lessons. I print the questions for them and hand them out as they come into the room so they can get straight to work. I find that using the Windows snipping tool I can easily fit two sets on an A4 landscape page making them economical to print or copy; this is a size that can easily be stuck into exercise books which my students choose to do.
The above image shows, appropriately the higher questions for January 31st. I tend to hunt the collection looking for sets that include particular topics. Following their earlier mock exam we decided that we needed more trigonometry practise so I made sure that a trigonometry question appeared in each day’s set for several sessions; it has been very rewarding to see the speed and confidence they now seem to have on for example the sine and cosine rules. I have also sought question on topics that we have not met for some time.
I do believe that asking students to recall topics regularly is very valuable, see my earlier post “Highlighting is a Waste of time”. Using short GCSE questions like this fits in with the distributed practice idea. Short tests can be useful too – on Monday Year 11 will be getting 10-a-day under timed exam conditions!
Thank you so much Mr Corbett from myself and my students!