Studying at home whether at Easter or during Covid-19 is hard for students. Here are some practical tips that you should follow to allow you to achieve your maximum success in the exam at home.
Healthy Eating
Eat well! It’s important to realize that the fuel we put into our bodies affects our ability to concentrate and study. Remember Learn Recover put simply. I often tell parents and students if you eat junk, you’ll probably feel like junk so you must eat well during this time.
Get Sleep
Equally, it’s very important to get quality sleep. People tend to think of sleep as the end of today, however, we should think of sleep as the start of tomorrow. If you’ve had a stressful day or an argument with someone it’s going to impact your sleep and your functionality tomorrow. I think more students need to realize the night before will affect your tomorrow’s productivity especially if you are under-rested. We should also remember that when you’re preparing for the Leaving Cert that sleep is vital to success.
Exercise
It doesn’t matter what type of exercise you do from tap dancing to rugby; the important thing is that you move your body and oxygenate your blood cells. The more exercise you do the more energy you will have. Most students think when they use energy that they will have less energy. From my experience it is the opposite, exercising for 30 minutes a day will help reduce anxiety and stress and will help your sleeping patterns. It’s a win win scenario! The best students I’ve worked with continually exercise, even though they’re studying nonstop and under pressure. Exercise is like a magic tablet that will allow them to perform better throughout the year.
Schedules
Studying at home during the pandemic has been particularly difficult for students. This is because their schedule has been disrupted, in school we follow a strict timetable we know exactly what room we should be in and for how long. When we work from home one of the greatest challenges is to find routine. It’s really important that you get up at a regular time, start to study for exams, set a morning break and lunch break and make sure they are for definite lengths and times. You don’t want you going for lunch break and finding yourself not returning to study for three hours. If at any point you are studying at home to maximize your productivity you should set a start time and a definite stop time and then sit down to begin to plan your study session.
The SAS have a saying that proper preparation prevents poor performance. Your first action should be to plan the day. When you plan out of your day and set goals in front of yourself, I think it’s important that you set a goal that you know you will achieve. Sometimes students make the mistake of setting tons of work for themselves to complete and don’t finish despite having done good quality work and spent quite a few hours working they finished with a sense of failure and disappointment. it is important to set achievable goals so that you feel good about your hard work.
