A Level revision tips

One of my Y13 students intends to resit Statistics 1 and Core 2 this summer, alongside Core 3, Core 4, and Mechanics 1.  I devised a five-week plan to cover each module in an hour per week.  This centred on five one-page summary sheets for five broad areas.

These are not meant to be a complete, perfect summary of the course, simply an idea to prompt the memory and recall the key facts and processes.  Hence they are deliberately rough and ready, intended as a work in progress to be added to or scribbled out, highlighted or re-written.

m1-moment-um

When teaching full A level classes, I used to employ a similar idea, but ask the students to prepare one topic each.  With larger classes it may be two students to one topic – which allowed for some collaborative effort, potentially productive in its own right.  The instructions were always that the sheet should not go beyond one page, enough copies had to be produced for the whole class, and the student had to go give a short summary to the class for 5-10 minutes to introduce their revision sheet.  It provided for a bit of fun, and the best sheets used to be added to the school’s VLE for reference by future year groups.

Examples are below for anyone to make use of as they wish.

Mechanics 1
Kinematics
Vectors
Resolving forces
Laws of motion
Momentum and moments

Statistics 1
Representing and summarising data
Discrete data
Bivariate data

Thanks for reading,

Steve Fearnley

Steve Fearnley, MA MEd PGCE, has been a maths teacher for over 30 years as well as being a deputy headteacher. He is now a private maths tutor, covering KS3 up to A Level, as well as an author for both MyMaths.co.uk and our brand new AQA GCSE Maths Student Books.