Consolidating learning independently

With exams being cancelled and schools being closed, you're probably not getting the support you normally would for your subjects, but you’ll still have to prove that you know your stuff to your teachers as they will be the ones deciding your grades. Normally, in school you would have revision lessons, or extra time with your teachers to make sure you are comfortable with everything they’ve taught you. At home, this might not be possible or as effective so it's essential that you try and do some of this yourself. If you have exams next year, this is also very important as losing out on a big chunk of proper school time means that you have to put in even more work yourself to make sure you're fully ready and prepared for next year’s exams. 

Consolidating your learning basically means making sure that you’re comfortable with everything you’ve learned and would be comfortable going through it with somebody else. In many ways it's similar to revision - because with revision you also need to make sure you’re comfortable with your content but there’s that extra element of making sure it's all ready to be put into an exam.  This makes consolidating easier in a way, but doing this by yourself will still be a challenge. To start with, choose specific days where you go over what you've learnt so far - it could be once a day, once a week or every fortnight, as long as you leave yourself enough time to go over everything well enough so you know how comfortable you are with everything. The more you do this, the easier it will become for you. 

To keep yourself engaged, and to make sure you're actually taking your content in, it's important that you don't just read over your notes and the work you've done during school/online learning. Switch it up and vary it: answer questions on your topics, watch videos on your subject, maybe even try and go over some things with your friends - you might be able to explain things to each other that you weren’t so sure about from before, and it's always good to see their faces, even if it is on a screen, when you've been stuck at home for so long. 

It’s important that you test yourself, it doesn’t have to be exam style questions (although this would probably the most effective thing to do), it could be quizzes you find online or questions your teachers have set you but you've never done, but as long as you're doing something to track your progress and mark out the topics or other specific things you are weaker on. This way, you can focus more on these weaknesses so that if you do get tested on them, you will be fine. 

Even though exams are cancelled, you have to be ready for any change this year. Everything is so unpredictable so the best way to make sure you’re prepared for everything is to make sure you know everything you’ve learnt inside out so that there’s no reason for you to be penalised for something that you didn’t know was coming. There may not be as much motivation to keep working hard, but try and motivate yourself by thinking of how important it is to you that you do succeed, and your hard work will pay off.