Personal Study Timetables

Download the personal study timetable for each year group below.

Types of Personal Study

Personal study at St Bede’s is set for one of four reasons:

  • Retrieval practice
  • Pre-learning tasks
  • Reading
  • Exam questions

Retrieval practice 

This is important because it requires students to recall previously learnt knowledge, doing this creates stronger memory traces and the likelihood that the information will be transferred to the long-term memory is increased.

Pre-learning tasks

Pre-learning activities are aimed at helping students to develop pupils’ curiosity and interest before learning new material. It is often an opportunity to introduce new vocabulary and ideas.

Reading

Reading has many benefits.  Not only can it be relaxing and calming, it has many educational benefits;

  • Improves vocabulary
  • Better comprehension skills
  • Improves memory
  • Improves writing skills
  • Improves performance at school, in all subjects not just English!

Exam questions

Exam questions allows students to apply the knowledge they acquire in lessons and practise the application to the exam setting, become accustomed to exam language and understand the use of mark schemes to help with performance in the exams.

Personal Study will be set for all pupils on EduLinkOne.

Edulink One login page: https://www.edulinkone.com/#!/login

Tips for studying

Set a realistic time of the day/week to do homework and regularly keep to this.
Try to do your homework at the same time every day — e.g. right after school, just before dinner, or right after dinner.  Try not to leave homework until just before you have to go to bed.

Remove all distractions (phone, iPad, computer, TV)
Your phone and other devices will distract you from completing your personal study. This will lead to either incomplete work or completed to a poor standard, and you are less likely to remember the information over time.

Find a place that makes studying easy.
Collect up all the books and supplies you’ll need before you begin to work.  Do your homework in the same place every day.

Spend more time on hard homework than easy homework.
If you know what’s easy and what’s hard, do the hard work first.  Take a short break if you are having trouble keeping your mind on a task.

If homework gets too hard, ask for help.
Use all resources you have to help e.g. revision guides or online sites such as BBC bitesize. If you still need help can your parents or older siblings help.  Leave enough time before the due date to ask your teacher for help if you need it.

Get ahead – do not leave personal study until the night before the deadline
Checking Edulink regularly will help you to make a plan of what homework to complete and when to complete it by. If you leave the homework until the night before it is due, you will be unable to ask for help from your teacher if you need it.

Independent Study/Revision Sites

 https://quizlet.com/en-gb

A free online revision tool which allows students use flashcards to learn and revise knowledge.

https://senecalearning.com/en-GB/

A free revision tool which sets students questions, and uses their performance to identify areas for improvement. This allows students to revisit content they need to priorities working on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/secondary

A free website which allows students to learn knowledge from their subjects, broken down into all topics. They can also test their knowledge with short quizzes at the end each topic.