20 teaching ideas for revision

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Who am I? Ask pupils to write down lines of dialogue said by a given
character in a play or novel. Each student stands at the front of the classroom
and reads out the dialogue until someone guesses which character it belongs
to.

Dominos. Create a set of dominos with questions on a given text one half
of the domino will have a question, the other will have an answer to a different
question. Working in pairs, students put together the dominos, matching
answers with questions.

You say we pay. Ask a student to stand in front of the whiteboard and either
write or project an author or character onto the board (which the class can
see, but the student cant). The class has to describe the character or author
and the student must guess who it is.

Essence exercise. Working in pairs, ask students to break down a poem or
scene from a play by choosing the one most important word in each line.
Write down those words and discuss why they are powerful and why the poet
or playwright chose those rather than alternative words.

Examiner for the day. Provide the class with sample questions from the
examination board and ask them to come up with as many potential questions,
in the style of the examination board, as they can for a given text. Then have
them swap papers and write plans for answering the questions.

Retro games. Games like pass the parcel or top trumps are a great medium
to use when revising. Simply provide a selection of questions, or get the
students to come up with their own.

Power tree. Get the students to draw a tree and ask them to place all the
characters in a novel or play on the tree, with the most powerful at the top and
the least powerful at the bottom. They should then find quotations to support
their choices.

Just a minute. Students are given a revision topic and have to speak about it
for one minute without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Try this with literary
terms, themes, context, critical perspectives and texts.

Circle the room. Write topics on large pieces of paper and place these
around the room. Assign students one of the topics and give them two
minutes to write down everything they know about it. After two minutes they
have to move to a new topic until they have written about each topic. Collect
and share.

I still dont know. Hand out post-it notes and ask pupils to write down any
nagging questions they have on a topic. Display on board and, as the
questions are answered, remove.

20 teaching ideas for revision
www.teachit.co.uk 2013 21444 Page 2 of 2





What do you know? Give students a blank piece of paper. Ask them to write
down everything they know on a specific topic. Students then pass the paper
on to the next group who have to add their own knowledge. A great
collaborative working exercise.

Topic in 100 words. Students have to write about the topic in a hundred
words only. They could be given specific elements to write about and then
collate all the pieces of writing together.

Guess the grade! When studying for an exam, give students a B/C grade
example answer. Using marking criteria, students should add content and
techniques to upgrade the answer and remove content and techniques to
downgrade the answer.

Create your own quiz sheet. Students create their own quiz/revision guide.
This could be done as a homework and then used as part of the next lesson.

Colour coded chart. Somewhere in your room have a board with three
different coloured pieces of paper on. At the end of a lesson (or at the start/
end of a topic), use the board for students to put up markers to show where
they feel they are in terms of their knowledge of the topic.

Noughts and crosses. Use this simple yet effective game to check and build
on knowledge. You could even get students to come up with the questions
themselves.

Captions. On slips of paper, students write a caption or headline for each
chapter of a novel or scene for a play, such as, Young lovers conduct a secret
midnight meeting. Shuffle the slips so they are no longer in chronological
order and then exchange with another group, asking them to put them in the
correct order.

Revision postcards. On a blank postcard, students write down five areas to
revise within a key topic. Put them into a pot and mix them up. Students
then take five cards out and these form the revision areas they should focus
on for that week.

Varying vocab. When revising essay writing, get students to highlight the first
word of each sentence. Do they need to alter them in order to make their
sentences more interesting and varied? Award points/sweets for each change
that they can make with bonus points if they can explain how it has improved
their sentence.

Revision calendar. Students could make their own revision calendar for the
week or month leading up to the exam with a revision activity for each day.
Teachit has a PowerPoint resource like this Twenty revision ideas (20887)
that students could model their answer on.