It's the time of year again where everyone is coming to the end of teaching their course, possibly a little bit later than usual with the amount of content in the new exams, and now we have to think about revising and setting activities, that will either help students consolidate their knowledge or exam skills (check our Lucy Ryall's blog entry on embedding exam technique here). Below are a number of different activities that I've used for revision either in lesson, for homework or in revision sessions.
Revision clock
This is a staple of many history classrooms and TMSouthHistorians has previously written about the activity in the T&L Times (find it here). To create a revision clock all you have to do is divide a topic into twelve sections with headings for each, this can be printed onto an A3 sheet or students can be given the clock and divide a double page themselves.
You can place key words around the edges to act as prompts to remind students what to write. Or better still project the clock sheet with images in each section to make students have to remember the key words.
During the task students have 5 minutes to fill each sections with key facts, people, events and details relevant to the heading. You could also adapt it so that they have 2 minutes on their own, 2 minutes to look through their book and then 1 minute with the person next to them. The beauty of this is at the end of the task students will have an A3 that nicely summarises an entire topic, which gives them a great place to start recapping the topic on their own. These sheets can then be brought out during other tasks as a help sheet so students can quickly skip read and check their own knowledge.
Recently Alex Fairlamb (@LambHeartTea) shared her revision clocks and set it as a homework task which the revision clock including exam style questions, and a range of other tasks such as write a mnemonic about x.
Hexagons
Similarly to the revision clock students are given different hexagon pictures that represent different subjects from a topic and students are tasked to summarise the images including dates, key words etc. Students can then be challenged to make links between the topics, this can be made easier if students cut out the hexagons and spread them out. The images work well as they act as prompts for students, whilst they are completing the task you can read through different students work and question them on any misconceptions or to make students expand on a point they have made.
Upgrading
Partly inspired by Victoria Hewett's (aka @MrsHumanities) idea of ACE assessment (read more here), students are given a short basic summary of an event or key person etc and are tasked with improving and explaining it. Students need to add specific examples, key words, and explaining what it is referring to. This worked particularly well when recapping the reasons why the Spanish Armada failed as students could also highlight sections into specific reasons why it failed. This task is a great way to see how well students understand a particular event or topic and whether they can explain it correctly. This can easily been translated to exam questions where students have to upgrade and annotate a weak model answer with students having to explain what is good and needs to be improved and then tasked with making the improvements themselves writing our their own improved paragraph.
Revision quilt
An idea that took twitter by storm this year and we have highlighted in our T&L Times and Karen Knight has blogged about for us check them out to read about the idea in a bit more detail. The idea involves creating a grid of key words for a unit/topic, with students then being given categories to sort them into. Students then spend the time deciding which key words go in which category, this helps students recall what the words mean and understand what topics/questions they should use each key word for, so when they see a particular word in an exam question they know what they can talk about. For a revision homework students can be given a blank quilt with a topic heading students then have to fill it with key words and statistics.
Thematic study sheets
A great task for consolidating thematic topics like medicine through time or crime and punishment. Students are given a table like the one below with the key factors and time periods from the topic. Students must them fill the table with key facts and examples of the role of each of these in each time period. E.G for Chance in the Renaissance students will describe Pare's discovery of his ointment. The next class I did this task with I made them use two different color pens to represent when factors either helped or hindered progress. This student in the example below then decided that he wanted to include a line to represent the importance of the factor throughout time which I thought was a nice addition. Once the table is completed students have a A3 sheet that acts as a great summary and starting point when they are at home revising on their own. Students were then given a similar sheet for the medicine through time topic but replaced the factors with headings such as surgery, public health, belief about disease and had to explain how these changed during each time period.
This task can be adapted and students are given a quick description of the factor and students are tasked with practicing explaining the impact, in a PEE style format like they would in an exam.
Keyword cards
These cards I use a lot and with lots of different topics. I have found there are so many key words for students to learn so I made cards with every single key word on them, and have created a number of different tasks and ideas to use them to embed their use in essays and in class. Here just a few of the ideas below.
I have the key words in a large bowl and during a lesson students will be "randomly" chosen to put their hand in and pick a card, they will then have to define the key word and try to provide a fact or statistic as well. Each key word has a picture to act a prompt for the word as well.
Students in groups can be asked to put the key words into a chronological order making a large timeline of key words. I have a large set that can be pegged on string and turned into revision bunting.
Students can be tasked to make links between the words and using whiteboard pens draw the links between the different cards and explaining them on the tables.
Students can play snap with the cards and "snapping" when two words that link together appear followed by them explaining the link
In revision session and quick starter can be a came of "heads up" where students randomly choose a word and place in on their forehead and take it in turns question the group until they can guess their word.
Significance Circles
Significant circles are great for revision topics or questions where judgement are needed. Students are given a particular question and students make make a decision about the most important reason. The most important goes in the biggest circle and students explain their choice including evidence to back it up. Students can then draw links between the different circles and then explain the links between the different reasons. It works well for medicine and thematic topics but also questions like What was the most important reason America failed in the Vietnam War? Why did Hitler come to power? etc.
Low Stakes Testing
This idea comes from @mrshf_histo and has worked a treat with a number of my classes in both history and sociology. Students are given a quiz of 20-30 multiple choice questions, followed by either a task to define or place in chronological order key people, words or events. Followed up a choice of exam questions. This can be designed so that the first two tasks builds up to the final questions. These can be set as homework and students can be given the same one occasionally with the aim to beat their first score.
Recently Richard Kennett (@Kenradical) came up with a different approach to this idea which I love. Students have exam questions with multiple choice options about how to answer the question, which leads to discussions about the best way to answer particular exam questions, which I am dying to try out.
Roll it Recap
A quick way to start a revision session and get students thinking. In small groups students take turn rolling dice and then describing and giving facts about whatever topic they land on. Other students checked the answers given to ensure that the answers being given were right and could also challenge an answer they think could be expanded further.
Source Match Up
This task really helped my students with their source skills. Students were given possible purposes/messages of sources and students had to match them with specific sources and then annotate the picture with the events they are referring to and the what the specific message of the source.
The tasks was made that little bit harder by removing the provenance and description of the sources. Therefore students really had to look at the tiny details within the sources to work out what the source was actually trying to show.
Question Competition
The inspiration for this idea came from a science teacher from my NQT school, I wanna say Kim Hurlock (sorry if this is wrong). Students are given a list of exam style questions and in groups they have a set amount of time to produce plans for as many of the questions as possible. More points were given to the questions that are worth more in the exam. Students had to write down their plan including at least 2 factual pieces of information and a summary of their argument. Their teams couldn't score the points until I had checked the plan, if it wasn't correct they were sent away to consult their team to correct it. If it was correct the points were recorded and displayed on the power point. Students loved the competitive element of the lesson and planned a lot of questions and got feedback on each one. The end of the lesson concluded with me going through the questions where I had noticed the same misconceptions had occurred multiple times from different groups.
The templates and a number of the resources discussed will be uploaded to our resources section ASAP.
