Exam revision tips for teenagers

Do you have a teenager with exams coming up? You’ve probably noticed that it’s quite a stressful time for them, and you can probably remember how stressful your own exams were in school. But with just a few exam revision tips you can take most of the stress out of exams.

GCSE exams can be a stressful time for a lot of teenagers, and there are a lot of distractions these days that can provide children with a welcome escape from that stress. So, it’s important to teach your teen how to balance revision and relaxation so that they can limit the stress of their exams.

There’s also plenty that you can do to help encourage your child to revise and provide them with the reassurance that they need to succeed in their exams. Let’s take a look at what you can do to help, the exam revision tips you can pass on to your child, what makes a good exam revision learning environment and some exam revision methods. 

Quick exam revision tips for you

While you can’t take the exams for your child or do the revision for them, you can help in a few simple ways…

• Be enthusiastic and optimistic about their revision and exams
• Celebrate the small wins and concepts they’re learning well, rather than focusing too much on what they’re struggling with (a tutor can help with struggle points)
• Keep calm, especially when you’re helping with their revision
• Let them revise in a way that works best for them, rather than trying to force them to revise in a way that worked best for you or their siblings
• Let them take regular breaks
• Limit distractions when they are revision, such as their phone, television or video games.

Sticking to these simple tips will ensure your child has a much easier time with their revision, as well as having a healthier approach to learning. Remember to always show a positive attitude towards their learning, and show an interest in helping them revise.

Revision tips to pass on to teens

As we said earlier, you can’t do the exam for your child. But, you can give them some handy tips to help them revise. Remember, you’re not trying to change the way that they learn - everyone learns in a different way. These are just some simple tips that can work with any learning style…

• Take on the more challenging things first while you’ve got more energy to focus and retain information
• Spread revision subjects out rather than trying to revise every topic in one day, you’ll take on information more easily and avoid getting confused
• Take regular breaks, go out for a walk, get some fresh air, and do a little exercise to give your brain a 15 minute break for every hour of revision
• Don’t get frustrated if you’re struggling with a particular problem, just make a note of it, take a break and then talk to your teacher about it when you next see them
• Give yourself rewards by doing something you enjoy after every revision session, something that’ll mark the end of your revision day to give you a clear break
• Don’t get distracted - turn off the TV, put your phone down and just for an hour focus on your learning
• Have a day off every week, whether that’s Saturday or Sunday, you need at least one full day to just relax.

A good exam revision learning environment

One of the best things you can do to help your child revise is to provide a good learning environment for them. Whether it’s an entire room or a quiet corner in your home, set up a workstation where your child can do their homework and exam revision with limited distractions and everything they need to learn. 

The workstation

The most important part of an exam revision learning environment is the workstation. Start with a suitable desk with good lighting and all of the stationary your child will need.

A distraction-free zone

Set the workstation as a phone-free zone, and try to set it up somewhere without a television in your child’s line of site. Remind your child that they have the rest of your home for phones and other distractions, but this one corner is only for studying. That way your child will only associate their workstation with learning. 

If your child’s workstation is within earshot of your television, try keeping the volume down while your child is studying. This will help them concentrate and show them that you respect their learning. Why not take a look at our tips for managing your child’s screen time?

An organised space

Help your child to organise their revision within their workstation. There are a few ways you can do this…

• Provide folders for each subject so your child can organise their revision notes and easily pick up where they left off when they move on to revise another subject
• Help them create a revision diary or timetable so that they have a visual plan of what to revise each day
• Ensure that their exam timetable is somewhere visible in their workstation so that your child knows which exams are coming up first and which topics they need to focus on revising. 

Explore Learning’s exam revision methods

While everyone learns differently there are some tried and true methods when it comes to revising for exams. Here are some of our suggestions for revision methods that might help your child with their learning…

• Use past exam papers to practise for the exams - you can find different past papers on exam board websites, for example here are AQA’s past exam papers
• Make use of online resources and learning tools, such as BBC bitesize
• If simply writing notes isn’t helping information stick in, try to vary it up by drawing diagrams, charts and graphs
• Encourage your child to read their revision notes out loud, and possibly even record them to listen back to later
• At the end of each learning, day ask your child to make a quick bullet point summary of what they’ve learned so they can quickly go back to it
• Similarly, encourage your child to use their revision diary to make a quick summary of what they’ve revised each day. 

Exam revision tuition with Explore Learning

We understand that preparing for exams can be stressful for teenagers. Luckily, we’re champions of stress-busting when it comes to learning. We understand that every child has a different approach to learning and that one method of retaining information may work for one child but might not work as well for another. 

That’s why Explore Learning we get to know how your child learns on an individual level. We can tailor our teaching approach to suit your child, so that revision seems less stressful and intimidating. By helping your child take the stress out of exam revision, we’ll give them the chance to focus more on retaining information so they can do their best in their exams. Enquire through bloss to if you would like to learn more about how we can help you. 

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