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 We share more tips offered by experienced educators, parents and top-scorers on how to make effective use of the time left to prepare for the examinations.
1. Have your schedule and stick to it
If you don’t have a study schedule by now, draw one up ASAP. If your child has been ‘studying’ without a clear revision plan or outline, do some diagnostics tests or speak to your child’s teacher or tuition teacher to identify ‘troublespots’ that you can assign more time to in your study schedule. Remember that you need to work in some leisuretime as well – it cannot be all work and NO play.
2. Feed the body, not just the mind
Start taking multivitamins, health supplements and stock up on ‘brain food’ if you haven’t already. Don’t wait until exam month to fortify your child against illness and infection. For some parents, the PSLE year is truly the ‘Chicken Essence’ year! Studying may be sedentary work but our bodies need energy to be able to concentrate and absorb information.
3. Know the essentials!
Rote learning has been thrown out by educators, and for good reason. Studying hard means studying smart – know what are the relevant points / facts of each topic to remember, and more importantly, how to use them and apply them, especially in the case of Maths and Science. There's not much time left - creating summary lists, mindmaps, index cards, etc may help your child during revision. Find a method that works and use it to cut the ‘info clutter’.
4. Read diligently, read intelligently
At the core of every top scorer is a sound base of language skills and learning techniques that include a good vocabulary, effective reading skills (ability to read for speed and understanding), ability to summarise, analyse and recall, and creative writing skills. These take months and years to build up. However, in the weeks left before the exam, you can expose your child to various text sources on varied topics – a newspaper clipping, a magazine feature, an article in an e-Zine. Use them to create exercises that will help your child brush up on such skills – write a summary, check out the meanings of new words, ask questions to test your child’s comprehension of the story and so on.
5. Recall, Rephrase, Summarise
In Part One, we mentioned the need to read diligently and read intelligently, and that the ability to summarise, analyse and recall are essential. We cannot emphasize this more. Hone your child’s ability to read and digest different types of information – short comprehension passages, long problem sums, information in charts and tables, just to name a few. Test your child’s understanding of these by asking him or her to rephrase or summarise the content, or to state what is being asked for.
6. Use Mock Exams effectively and productively
Beware the pitfalls of becoming a mock-exam addict. Mock exams are good for exposing your child to as realistic an exam setting as possible in terms of the range of questions, the time constraint etc. However, you need to be sure that your child is ready for them, and that adequate revision covering all subjects and all areas has already been done. Mock exams are also extremely stressful – while you want to prepare him or her, you don’t want to overstrain your child’s physical and mental health.
7. Having ‘Beyond Exams’ chitchats
Yes, there IS a life beyond the PSLE. While leisure time is important, you also need to build ‘personal’ time with your child and show interest in him or her as a person with other interests and concerns apart from schoolwork. Your child will be the healthier and happier for it.
8. Stay Focused
One of the easiest ways to get jittery and pile on the stress is to see what else is happening with other ‘PSLE families’. Of all the students sitting for PSLE this year, the most important one is YOUR child. Know your child’s needs, targets and progress – how others are progressing are less relevant. Neither hould you allow your children or yourself to be pulled into ‘comparing sessions’ by friends and relatives.
Do you have other PSLE Revision tips to share? What worked for your child? Do share with us.
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