Week 4 of 6 — keep going
The first week of term after the holidays is often when the exam timetable starting to feel very real. School is in full swing with focussed lessons, revision classes and teachers coaxing you for that final push. That's a good thing, even if it doesn't feel like it yet. Structure helps. Momentum helps. Being in school, around your teachers and your classmates, is exactly where you need to be right now.
This week's tasks are designed to run alongside that - not add to an already full plate, but give your evenings some direction. Work through them across the week, a subject at a time.
Three weeks to go. Everything you're doing now is building towards something.
For parents and carers: if they seem more stressed this week than before the holidays, that's normal. Being hit by the reality of the timeline in week one back can feel like pressure. Keep the lines of communication open, keep home as calm as you can, and make sure they're sleeping. It matters more than an extra hour of revision.
This week’s focus
-
This week's focus is Macbeth — with Literature Paper 1 being your first English exam this summer, this is the priority.
There are two parts to the Macbeth question:
Extract question (20 minutes): you'll need to discuss how characters are speaking and behaving in a given extract, and consider how an audience would react. The extract can come from anywhere in the play.
Essay question (40 minutes): you'll track a character or theme across the whole play, drawing on pivotal moments and using key quotations with analysis.
✅ Revise the plot, characters, themes and key quotations — your revision booklet and pivotal moments booklet are both there to support this.
✅ Watch GCSEPod instructional videos on Macbeth and complete the 'check and challenge' quizzes.
✅ Practise by planning and attempting responses to 👉 these exam style questions 👈
-
✅ Keep working through your Pinpoint booklets — use SPARX or MathsGenie video clips if you get stuck on a topic. If something still isn't clicking, ask your teacher.
✅ Past papers are the most valuable revision you can do at this stage. Access them via MathsGenie or pick them up in school. Use the marks allocated to each question to judge how long to spend on it and how much working out is expected.
✅ This week, focus particularly on multi-mark questions — practise structuring your answers clearly and showing your working. And remember: never leave a blank. If you can't answer the full question, look for the one or two marks you can pick up.
-
This week's focus is Biology and Chemistry.
Biology Focus: Enzymes
✅ Core Knowledge Revisit 1: Revisit B4 Bioenergetics questions from your Biology Paper 1 Core Knowledge Book
✅ Core Knowledge Revisit 2: Revisit all B2 Organisation questions from your Biology Paper 1 Core Knowledge Book
✅ Revision Videos: Watch, pause often, and build mind maps from memory.
✅ Complete questions on these topics on SPARX
Chemistry Focus: Acids, Bases and Salts
✅ Core Knowledge Revisit 1: Revisit all C2 Structures and Bonding questions from your Chemistry Paper 1 Core Knowledge Book
✅ Core Knowledge Revisit 2: Revisit all C4 Chemical Changes questions from your Chemistry Paper 1 Core Knowledge Book
✅ Revision Videos: Pause often and build mind maps from memory.
✅ Complete questions on these topics on SPARX
-
✅ Listening and Reading Log on to Languagenut — Middle/High School → French/Spanish → Exam Skills → AQA → KS4. Complete at least two listening and two reading activities from each of the three themes: Communication and the World Around Us; People and Lifestyle; Popular Culture.
✅ Writing Using the revision materials you made in Week 1, practise your key verbs across all six tenses for all six pronouns (I, you, he/she, we, you plural, they)
Six tenses:
present (I do)
preterite (sp) /perfect (fr) (I did)
imperfect (I used to do)
conditional (I would do)
near future (I am going to do)
simple future (I will)
Key verbs to focus on:
Spanish: jugar, comer, ver, tener, hacer, ir, ser, estar
French: jouer, manger, regarder, avoir, faire, aller, être
-
This week's focus is Medicine Through Time.
✅ Step One: Use your Revision Guide to make notes on areas of weakness across the three strands: Surgery and Anatomy, Public Health, and Understanding Disease and Treatment. Creating a timeline for each strand is an excellent way to organise your knowledge.
✅ Step Two: Use the chart of past questions at the front of your revision guide to create bullet point plans for your answers.
✅ Step Three: Watch the exam technique videos on your Teams page for this paper.
❓Test Me Tips — for parents and carers: Use pages 22–29 of the Test Me booklet to check your child's understanding. Read the questions, listen to the answers.
-
This week's focus is Urban Issues and Challenges (Paper 2).
✅ Work through this retrieval questions document completing it section by section. As you go, rate your confidence honestly:
🔴 Red — not confident: this is your priority revision
🟠 Amber — some confidence: worth revisiting
🟢 Green — confident: move on
✅ Once you've answered all the retrieval questions, review your ratings. Can any ambers move to green? Any greens that, on reflection, need more work?
❓Test Me Tips — for parents and carers: Ask your child to talk you through one section of the topic — what it's about, what they're confident on, what's still red. Just having to explain it out loud is useful revision in itself.
Technique of the week
🗣️ Verbalising
Most revision happens silently: reading, writing, highlighting. Which is fine, but it uses only part of your brain. Saying things out loud uses more of it, and that makes the information stick differently.
How to do it well:
Close your notes and explain a topic out loud as if you're teaching it to someone who knows nothing about it. Don't summarise, explain. What is it? Why does it matter? How does it connect to other things you know? If you stumble or go blank, that's the information you don't actually know yet. Go back, re-read, then try again.
You can do this alone — standing in your bedroom talking to the wall is completely valid revision. But if you can find a willing audience, even better.
Tip for parents: you are the perfect revision partner for this, precisely because you don't know the content. Ask your child to explain a topic to you from scratch. Ask the obvious questions: "But why?" "What does that mean?" "What happened next?" You're not checking answers, you're making them think harder. That's the whole point.
A reminder that your teachers are already supporting your revision in school — these emails are designed to complement that work, not replace it. If anything here raises questions, please ask your subject teacher.
The next email lands next Friday.
