Mr Bateson’s Y9 Classes

A message to parents

Starting shortly after the Christmas holidays, all pupils in Year 9 will begin the Personalised Learning scheme. They will review the mock exams taken before Christmas, identify areas of weakness and set an individual revision program which will take place between January and the final exams in April. All pupils will receive a Revision Guide to help them carry out this revision.

Because I would like to use lesson time to complete the Year 9 syllabus properly, my classes will be using homework time to complete personalised learning. Pupils will receive a separate exercise book for Personalised Learning and use the Personalised Learning grids to select suitable homework tasks each week.

Homework will be expected every Monday, otherwise pupils will be asked to attend a C3 detention on the following Wednesday!

Some advice:

• If the Learning task asks pupils to ‘read’ a page, they should make notes on what they have completed.
• If pupils are asked to answer questions, then they should be answered as full sentences.
• Key diagrams should be copied and labelled.

The Beaufort home-school agreement will play a key part in making sure Personalised Learning is effective. Revision is frequently a very boring task, so I would like to encourage all parents to take an interest in what their son or daughter is revising and help them get the most out of revision. If the set task is not helping, try using some of the ideas below to add variety. The Personalised Learning grids simply offer guidance, and you do not have to complete exactly the task that is advised.

Revision Ideas

• Create ‘pop quizzes’ by asking quick-fire questions from the relevant pages. Revise with your parents and friends rather than just sitting on your own.
• Use BBC Bitesize to learn facts before attempting the revision guide questions.
• Create Mind Maps to cover difficult topics. Link the important ideas together in circles, like a spider diagram, but on the connecting lines put reasons why these things are connected.
• Make colourful posters of the important topics (this will be quite acceptable as homework), and then hang them on your walls so you are learning without thinking about it!
• If you are a weak speller, record key spellings onto MP3 and put them on your MP3 player.