Studious Kate

I picked this beauty up during the January sales in Paperchase this year. For only a mere £4 this notebook had 150 sheets of pastel coloured A4 sheets in 10 shades. It has been my Bible when it comes to revision notes, topic summaries and night-before-the-exam-cram-sheets. Every subject is allocated a colour (of course). For my English Literature set text, I made a mindmap that linked all key quotes, main themes, characters, context etc. all on one page. On the morning of the exam, I had a quick glance over at breakfast and outside the exam hall, and it all seemed to stick. It's great to have all of my most recent revision notes all in one place, which makes life easier e.g. when you have to bring all your resources into lessons, if they're in one place then you can't leave things behind. I would really recommend getting yourself something similar: Spectrascope pastel notebook    

There is a vast difference between a flashcard (meh) and a Flashcard™ (yaas). A 'meh' flashcard, is a colourless, basic, unstimulating, useless, waste of a lined recatngle of card, or this can also refer to the overcrowded, waffle-filled, blinding mess of highlighter/gel-pen chaos that is on the other end of the spectrum. A 'yass' flashcard lies directly in the middle. You need to strike the balance between being concicse, yet providing enough detail to answer the question in a way that will get you all the marks. My golden rule would be don't go OTT (over-the-top), in terms of both colour and info. Black as the main body colour with a single legible colour to write key words, that can also be given as prompts by the person asking the question.  Underline neatly  any exact words or phrases stated on the mark scheme - tell whoever is testing yu, that you need to mention these word for word in your answer in order to put the card aside. NO FLUORESCENT COLOU...

No (non-psychotic) human can resist the temptation to bow down to our notification inbox, mindlessley scroll through instagram, open every single snapchat story or get engaged in the heated exchange of gossip in a whatsapp group chat. If you can honestly sya, hand on heart, you could leave your phone, unmuted, and not glance at your screen for two hours, then you are kidding yourself! Even on mute, the screen deviously lights up and airplane mode does not lock you out of texting and offline games. A solution to this issue is to voluntarily permit your parent to take your phone hostage until you get your work done - but realistically, this could be paic-attack inducing - can you imagine if they managed to crack your password, and took a browse out of interest! My method to having excellent self-control is to admit that you have none and instead, install an app that does the hard work for you. I wish I could say this is sponsored,but it just isn't, I just genuinely highly r...

Whilst my younger brother was studying for his end of year exams in Year 10, I went up to his revision basecamp (his bedroom) to discover him painstakingly scribbling out flashcards for (arguably) the easiest topic of chemistry - the periodic table. This is basic stuff. I kindly offered to test him on his newly made flashcards, to prove a point: He could already recall information on the flashcard and more with ease and admitted he knew it already. As any big sister would, I helpfully informed him that he wasted the past hour and a half revising what he knew already instead of getting down the the gritty, challenging stuff. He complained that he had no idea where to start revsising the syllabus, what even was on the syllabus, and what he would be tested on. I enlightened him on the existence of the holy, sacred and wonderous virtues of 'The Specification'. For those not in the know, which appears to be the majority of GCSE-ers, the specification is a document produced b...