How to Study Smart: 20 Scientific Ways to Learn Faster – Daniel Wong

Most of us have to learn something new at some point in our lives. Thankfully my GCSE, A level and BA days are behind me, but I still like to do short courses and if ever a fairy godmother dropped a fortune in my lap I’d love to do a Masters in the future.

These tips, which I found on the Open2Study Facebook page are for everyone who still has exams to pass. I especially like the one about taking notes with pen and paper, because I always feel more creative with a pen in my hand than a keyboard at my fingertips.

How to Study Smart: 20 Scientific Ways to Learn Faster – Daniel Wong.

Learning to spell in French

We’ve been working really hard on spellings in French this year. It’s the first year of French and we have been looking at pets. For the topic we learnt eight words for animals, and I challenged them to learn how to spell the words by working together to come up with some strategies.

I was hoping the highers would remember some of them and the lowers would remember one or two. In fact the whole class managed to learn and remember how to spell all 8 words. They employed a range of techniques ranging from using phonics, to word association to full-blown storytelling.

Hamster of course was easy – it’s the same as English. Chien they remembered by saying it in an English way – chi en. For poisson rouge they pictured a poisonous red fish, and for Chat they thought of a chatty cat. Lapin involved a story of a rabbit running laps around a field and winning a pin for finishing first. And then they got really creative…

Oiseau is “oh – I see you” and since Tortue looks like torture they had a story about a tortoise being tortured by having his second “r” taken away. But my absolute favourite was Yoda’s bitter pet mouse: hmmm the mouse sour is!

I’d love to hear about any techniques your class have come up with for learning their spellings so feel free to add a comment in the box below.