Reading, Writing and REVISION!

I was at a Christmas party on Saturday night, gleefully lost in my own food and cocktail induced euphoria, which is abnormal seeing as we´re one week away from the end of term.  But happy I was until a colleague decided that it was an appropriate time to inform me that my students would write their IGCSE Maths exam on April 30th.  Their first exam.  Take away two weeks we use to write mock exams, Carnival and Easter holidays and a large gulp of my festive gin and tonic quickly followed the news as well as an elevated heart rate and a such lack of social skills as all I could do was obsess over whether they would be ready.  So how did I spend the next day?  Using my new found connections on twitter to find out how other maths teachers out there help prepare their students for the big exams. ´

Currently I´m in my seventh year of teaching.  That means six rounds of exam season and so I feel fairly confident that I´ve got a few effective tricks up my sleeve, but as we all know the learning process never stops.

Here are a few ideas both tried and new that I will be going with this year:

• games -  these are great to reinforce exam key words.  I like Pictionary and talking heads in particular.  In talking heads three students come up to the board and face the class with their backs to the white board.  They each draw a key word from the hat and I write that key word over their heads so that they cannot see it but the class can.  They then take turns asking yes or no questions and the class can only respond with Yes/No/Maybe. 

• Past papers -  the best source to prepare students for their exam.  I create a spreadsheet with every objective that students are tested on and do some formatting with my spread sheet to quickly see who has trouble with which topic.  That´s not an uncommon trick, however, Mr Reddy of www.mrreddy.com has an excellent idea to take it to the next step.  I´m going to try this this year: http://mrreddy.com/blog/2013/12/mail-merge-after-a-maths-mock/.  Also check out his other tips in terms of revision.  As usual, great stuff there!

• perhaps send this around to parents and students http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7387621.stm

• Another good idea are ready made flash cards with all of the information ready to go: http://secondarymaths.wikispaces.com/GCSE+Revision+eFlashCards

• Also looks nice, though not sure how much students would use this: http://gcse.com/maths/index.htm.  Maybe I will use it in class for the odd topic. 

• And naturally William Enemy failed to disappoint with revision grids as well as other links to great resources.  Find his stuff at: http://www.greatmathsteachingideas.com/?s=revision

Panic attack over.  I´m actually REALLY looking forward to trying some of these great ideas and making the revision period a bit more fun this year.  I would still appreciate any other ideas as I realise this list is quite short.  Send me a message on twitter or please comment on this post.