How to Revise

Here’s a familiar scenario: You check in on your child to find that he is on his phone. The exams are just around the corner and you distinctively told him to*revise*.

His textbook is opened to the same page it was an hour ago. The nerve! You feel your body heating up, and you harness that energy in preparation to channel it into a hurricane of righteous rage at your errant child.

WAIT! That might actually do more harm than good!

Consider this: Perhaps your child does not know how to carry out his revision.

“Don’t know how to revise?” you may ask incredulously. “Doesn’t he know how to read?” Well, the issue may not be so simple.

1. Classify content

Between 4-5 subjects and over how many years your child has been in Primary school, there will be quite a daunting wealth of content to cover. If your child is anything like I was, it is very likely that he or she may have started reading a few pages of the textbook and lost focus.

Help your child to classify the content into clumps.

For example, in Science, “magnetism” is one clump of content. Within that, the sub-clumps can be natural and man-made magnets, stroking method and electromagnets, magnetic and non-magnetic materials, identifying a magnet, uses of magnets, e.t.c.

This way, your child can better identify knowledge gaps and specifically address those gaps. It also helps your child to know which topics are familiar and spend less time on them.

It’s an investment of time at the beginning for your child to self-assess himself or herself, but it will save a lot of time and pain later on.

2. Linking content

Now that the content has been classified, they need to be linked using an organisational tool like a concept map or mind map.

This is especially useful for Science.

None of the topics stand alone, but rather, are related to other topics.

Linking content helps your child to see a bigger and holistic picture of what he or she is learning and aids greatly in retention.

3. Identify required skills

For skill-based subjects, especially languages, your child should look at each task in their exam papers and ask themselves what skills are needed to perform them well.

For example, for English cloze passage: Does your child know the strategy to identify structural and contextual clues?

Or for Maths: Does your child know the steps of guess and check?

There is a finite number of required skills per subject, and your child should take the effort to learn them, know them by name, list them all down and become familiar with when and how to apply them.

4. Identify question types

For certain exam components, like grammar MCQ, synthesis and transformation, common science experiments, and some types of problem sums, the question formats are similar with just the variables changing.

When your child is doing practice papers, teach him or her to take a step back and look at the paper objectively. Can she see certain question types that keep recurring?

For example, in grammar MCQ, there is a question type that I call the “verb-noun-verb” question. Somewhere in the question stem there will be a phrase like “saw him _______” It is a phrase with a noun book-ended by two verbs, the first in simple past tense, and the second is usually in simple present tense, or rarely but possibly in continuous tense.

I would not advocate revision to solely be about spotting questions, but it’s a powerful activity nonetheless, and will guarantee a lot of marks for the student that takes the time to be familiar with them.

If your child has not been revising right, don’t try to implement all 4 strategies immediately. Implement them one at a time as the year progresses.

I guarantee, your child will be a lot more focused, confident and productive after each session of revision when he or she knows how to go about it.

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