How to wrap upyour first year of IB work in style
Over the last couple of weeks some of you may have found yourself staring longingly out the classroom window, with the Sun making a few tentative appearances and turning the great outdoors from drizzly grey to beautiful technicolour! This can only mean one thing: the Summer holidays are nearly here!!!
This week at Lanterna we’ve been setting our sights forward to the glorious long vacation. Obviously, Step 1 in the IB Summer Game Plan is to spend a good chunk of time daydreaming about all of the friends you’re going to catch up with, the Netflix series you’re going to binge our way through, the sleeping you’re going to do.
But it’s also worth having a think about how you can use your Summer to reach your IB goals.
Sort yourself out
Remember the pile of notes that has been accumulating in the corner of your bedroom for the past term, because you were far too busy to deal with it? Soon, Summer will arrive and your convenient excuse for slacking off will evaporate!Your first year notes are going to be super important when it comes to revision for final exams, so it’ll really pay off if you make sure they’re all complete and in order while you have the time. Get yourself some fun coloured ring binders, open the windows, blast some Summer tunes and spend a day getting organised. We promise you’ll feel very smug and virtuous when you’re done!
Go back and tackle your demons
Set yourself the goal that when you return to school after the Summer holidays, there will be no topic from your first year that you are still worried about or don’t understand. Now is the perfect time to go back and get a hold of the content that you found most difficult, when are able to go through itat your own pace, and without a million other school tasks draining your mental energy. For each subject, make a list of focus areas, then have a think about how you can go about confronting them. If you’re grumbling to yourself ‘if I didn’t understand it in class, what chance do I have when it’s just me and my textbook?’, consider this: you now have time to dip into all of the great study resources you didn’t have the time to try during term.
Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:
- Watch a Youtube video:
If you’ve ever sat in a maths class and remained completely mystified after the bell rings, Youtube videos could be the answer to your woes! The best thing about them? You can press PAUSE and REWIND as many times you like! No more feeling like you can’t ask your teacher to explain binomial distribution for a third time! Try mathsl1 for SL, and MathMathsMathematics for HL. For those of you who study history, psychology, economics, or the sciences, take a look at CrashCourse to get some studying done without feeling like you’re studying. Topics range from the Cold War to the Circulatory System, and
- Listen to a podcast:
Podcasts are a brilliant way to learn by osmosis (OK, diffusion…) as you go about your daily life! Whenever you know you’ve got to take a train, or have a long car journey in your near future, make sure you’ve got a bunch of podcasts loaded onto your phone to make the time fly by in a useful way. With a bit of Googling you can usually find a podcast about almost any IB topic of your choice, often created by IB teachers looking to offer their students another way to learn. Mr Allsop’s History Podcast is great, as is the Open University’s series on DNA, RNA and Protein formation for biology.
- Read a blog
The same is also true of blogs. Loads of IB teachers worldwide have created online platforms to share their knowledge with students.
Give your notes some TLC
All of the resources above can be used to go back and fill in any gaps in the notes you took throughout the year. That day that you slept through chemistry and missed out on the wonders of acid-base theory might not have seemed a big deal at the time, but when you come to revise next year you’ll wish you’d not stayed up all night on a Netflix binge!
Start by looking at some past paper questions for the topics you’ve covered so far, to give yourself a sense of whether or not your knowledge exam-ready. If not, now is the time to go back to your notes and fill in the detail. Here are some things you could do to beef up your notes:
- For History, start finding interesting historiography for each of the topics you’ve studied. Take a note of the historian’s name, publication date, and their opinion.
- Flesh out your case studies for Geography, and find examples that aren’t just the ones you learned in class. Note down a few facts and figures for each case study to quote in the exam and show that you really know your stuff.
- For science subjects, take a look at the syllabus and check that your notes cover all of the key syllabus points properly.
- Go through the texts you’ve studied for Language A and pick out useful quotes to answer past paper questions. Write them all down in a ‘quotes bank’.
- For Language B, start putting together a bank of idiomatic phrases and useful vocabulary to expand your range and boost your marks.
Sign up for a Lanterna Mid-IB course in Sweden or England
Join us
Maths SL:
Maths HL:
Crash Course:
History, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Economics