School exams can be a stressful time for children. They may feel overwhelmed with their revision or anxious about their results. As a parent, you may wonder how best to support your child through their exams, or how you can help them to prepare. With that in mind, here are some great tips from Dixie Grammar School on how to help your child revise for exams and manage their exam stress effectively:
Create a study area
Create a special area at home for your child to revise. This should be somewhere quiet where they will not be disturbed. You could also help them to create a study schedule for the wall. This will help to make revision more enjoyable and improve your child’s organisation and time management skills.
Be patient
When helping with revision, try to give your child time to work things out alone. This means listening to how and why they got to their answer and questioning areas they need to rethink.
Don’t pressure
Try not to set your expectations too high and instead allow your child to develop at their own pace. By putting too much pressure on children to achieve certain test results, you can actually have a negative effect on their academic performance and cause anxiety.
Talk about school
Encourage your child to ask questions and to talk to you about interesting things they have learnt at school. Repeating what they have learnt in class will help to store the information in their memory and this will help them when it comes to their end of term tests.
Read together
Support your child’s literacy skills by regularly reading with them. Find out what they have been reading in class and make time to read school books together at home. Reading is also a great activity for relaxing and reducing stress,
Learn as a family
Help to develop a love of learning, by demonstrating that learning can happen anywhere, not just in the classroom. For example, certain aspects of geography can be learnt in your own back garden or at a local park. You could also plan family days out to interesting places like museums or art galleries to support their studies at school.