Five steps to boosting your students’ home-learning using free resources

Mel Blount, Head of Digital Resources, shares her thoughts on five steps to help teachers get the most out of our free resources and to boost their students’ home-learning experience

Make the perfect start with our Knowledge Organisers

Each knowledge organiser is a succinct overview of a topic or theme. It gives students all the key information about what they will be learning, including key words, and sample questions. They are an ideal aide memoire or quick reference tool that can be used throughout the topic.

Access our new Blended Learning package

Designed to help students to take a more active role in their learning through knowledge checks, self-reflection, and written activities; our new Blended Learning modules help to ensure continuation of learning – whether at home or in the classroom.

These new resources enable teachers to free-up classroom time by giving students the core knowledge to learn in their own time. This then allows more time to develop those higher order skills, such as application, evaluation, and analysis. It also gives more time for the students to ask questions and develop a deeper understanding of the content and the teacher to address any misconceptions.

Discover our full range of free resources

We have a huge amount of free teaching and learning resources and materials that can help classroom delivery. They are particularly useful for those difficult concepts or for bringing challenging content to life. There’s also a range of generic tools that can help students to develop their thinking and acquire the skills they need for success.

Reinforce learning through practice and knowing what success looks like

Our Online Exam Review tool is an excellent resource for evaluating what makes a good answer. There are hundreds of sample scripts that can be used not only to exemplify good answers, but also highlight potential pitfalls. These will help both students and teachers understand what success looks like.

Question Bank is another great tool which can be used to practice answering a range of past paper questions either in class or at home. Teachers and students can build their own paper from the database of questions we have available. This is an excellent way to target areas of weakness as the student only receives questions that they need to practice rather than the original paper which would give them every type of question, even the ones that they are secure in.

Of course, our Past Papers are another great way for students to practice, prepare, and to build their understanding.

Keep reflecting and check your progress

This is a vital part of learning. We recommend using a learning log or journal where students can reflect on their learning, identify areas of success, and highlight challenges or areas of improvement.

Another good idea is to use simple checklists where students can tick-off what they have covered, and identify whether they are confident with their level of knowledge and understanding, or could do with a bit more help – see our Checklists for A level Psychology to see some nice examples.

Get in touch! We’re here to support you – if you need any help or guidance, or have any feedback or suggestion on resources, please do contact us at resources@wjec.co.uk