With the SA2s less than a month away, it is crucial for your child to begin revising for the different subjects. In order to maximise your child’s academic performance, emphasis should be placed on consolidating content knowledge and reviewing exam techniques.
How can you help ensure that your child receives adequate academic support leading up to the SA2 examinations? And just how much revision will be good enough for your child?
Revise Efficiently by Targeting Specific Components in Each Subject
"With the examinations coming so soon, I always emphasise to students the importance of practising skills, topics or concepts they will be tested on. If the exam involves solving word problems, you need to practise problem-solving; if the exam involves writing an essay, you need to work on composition writing."
— Ms Phua Kai Ying, Academic Director of The Learning Lab, Choa Chu Kang and Jem
We have noted some of the common mistakes that primary school students make for the SA2s below with tips on how to rectify them.
English Composition
Problem: Plot is convoluted and goes off-topic.
Solution: Plan the story, generate ideas and structure the flow of the composition by drafting out a story curve.
English Comprehension
Problem: Failure to understand the passage, resulting in inaccurate answers.
Solution: Use headers and annotations to break down a long and difficult passage. Identify characters and sequence of events.
Maths Short-Answer Questions
Problem: Transfer error — Filling in the wrong values from the question.
Solution: Write the value of each variable in the question. Show number sentence and check that the correct number has been transferred before computing.
Science Free-Response Questions
Problem: Giving an incomplete answer that has insufficient details.
Solution: Revise past work to understand the phrasing or points required for a complete answer.
Set Up a Revision Plan with Scheduled Breaks in Between
Preparation is the key to excelling in tests. Having a systematic approach to revision can help prevent your child from getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content knowledge to be revised.
Having a revision plan allows your child to prioritise his or her learning. It also helps your child to allocate time for revision according to his or her unique needs. Your child may also prioritise revision of the subjects that are tested earlier, or the subjects that he or she is weaker in.
Additionally, having some control over the revision schedule can give your upper primary child a sense of ownership and motivation to stick to the plan.
Don't forget to include break periods in the study plan. You can allocate 45 minutes for each study session, with a short break following it. Spacing out learning allows the brain to absorb and retain information better than studying for hours on end.
Eating healthy meals and getting adequate rest at night will also help your child perform at his or her best during the SA2 papers.
Click here for more tips on how you can prepare your child for upcoming tests.
Boost Your Child’s Revision Plan
You can further boost your child’s revision by going through his or her mistakes in previous tests or homework assignments.
By identifying the common mistakes that your child makes or the specific challenges faced within the various subjects, it allows you and your child to pinpoint which areas need to be worked on the most.
To prevent our students of making the same errors in the SA2 assessments, we encourage them to review previous assignments to familiarise themselves with the mistakes they commonly make and the corresponding corrections for each mistake.
As a supplement to your child’s revision plan, our TLL curriculum specialists have crafted a comprehensive and straightforward SA2 revision guide that you can download here.
This revision guide features common mistakes and challenges in English, Maths and Science, and our tips for answer precision with helpful and relevant examples for each subject.
Did You Find This Revision Guide Helpful?
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