How to Make the Most of the Summer Holidays

School is finally finished for the summer holidays! After all the early mornings, mocks exams and copious amounts of homework, you are finally free! Of course, when you are relieved of all your school related stress, the last thing you want to be doing is revision, but if you’re in Year 10, Year 12 or you’re sitting your 11+ exams in September, the summer holidays are the last chance to catch up on work and up your revision game!

How to plan revision time

      When you’re on holiday, especially when it’s six-weeks long, it’s easy to procrastinate and delay your revision and homework to a later time. It becomes incredibly difficult to motivate yourself; when you could sit and watch Netflix all day or go out and enjoy the sun why would you want to sit at your desk and revise? The only way to combat this sluggishness is to plan your time well. Make a revision timetable and schedule in time each week to spend on revision and revision only. Don’t overload yourself; these are your holidays so don’t drown yourself in work by working for five hours a day. Perhaps you can do an hour each day, or two hours and then not work over weekends? The only way you’ll have a productive summer is to ensure that you plan your time wisely so you can have a healthy balance between revision and relaxation.

Organise your work!

     A tidy desk = a tidy mind. You can’t work if all your worksheets are scattered around your desk, or your bag is a chaotic mess! You need to make sure you have separate folders for each subject. Having everything in the correct space will make life so much easier when you go to revise as you’ll know exactly where everything is. When you’re disorganised, you could spend more time looking around for the right worksheet instead of revising so avoid wasting valuable time in advance by ensuring that you stay organised.

Start revising!

     You’ve just completed an entire academic year and taken in a lot of information. From Maths formulae to an endless list of poems in English, it can be overwhelming to start revision and you just won’t know where to begin. Your teachers will have probably given you an abundant amount of homework, so this is probably the best place to kick off. Once this is done, you should make your revision notes. Go through specifications for each subject and record the information in as few words as possible to help you remember. For example, you could split your Science revision into the three branches (Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and then go through the specifications for each sub-topic (e.g.: B1, C1, P1). If you don’t understand something, it may be useful to ask a friend or put a question mark next to it to ask your teacher when you go back to school. Once you’ve made your notes, you’ll already be step ahead of everyone else in September and you’ll really thank yourself for it when it comes to exam season!

What else can I do?

     As well as revision, you could get stuck into some super-curricular activities. Summer Schools are an excellent way to begin; many universities offer them free of charge and they allow you to get a taste of what it might be like to study there. Also, work experience a great way to gain insight into potential future careers and will be an asset for your CV or Personal Statement!

If you’re stuck at home, or even by the beach on holiday, you could always get stuck into a good novel! In fact, at our centre, we’re running our own Reading Marathon encouraging students to read as many books as they can over the summer with prizes at the end. Reading can really help improve your spelling and grammar as well as expanding your creativity and it is nowhere near as demanding as revising. Try to find a book that you really enjoy to get into the habit of reading and borrow books from your local library for free entertainment throughout your summer break!