MY THOUGHTS ON REVISION: Reader's Cup 2018! 📖

Revision is a term I have become quite familiar with over the past few months.
I revise on everything; notably Science terms which I tend to do on flashcards, book summaries, reviews and studies which I tend to write a lot of notes about, and mathematics, which I will spend any given time of my day working hard on as it is a subject I'm determined to get better at this year. For maths revision I tend to take notes and use Khan Academy or Mathletics. 

Of course I use revision outside of school, too. I'm currently learning French in my few hours of spare time I actually have nowadays (my father can speak some of it and I'm generally very interested in learning new languages) and I tend to use online apps such as Quizlet or Busuu to help me with that.

With the Reader's Cup approaching I have a lot of English revision to do. I enjoy revision very much and love English so I'm not stressed about it, but I have a fair amount of books to take notes on and answer questions about. 

My favourite and most effective revision techniques. 
My favourite revision technique which I think is most effective for me is writing down lots of notes and eventually reading between the lines to summarise them.

I discovered this technique when I was writing rather philosophical poetry and had a breakthrough just by writing it in words. I used this technique with a few other books and discovered that it worked well. Simply by writing down main points, exploring the details of those main points, and re-reading chapters frequently I was able to gather more information about the book than I would have done just by reading it.

Another technique I like to use is flashcards - particularly the ones Quizlet provides. I make my own Quizlets frequently for this reason.

My revision planning for the Reader's Cup
The most difficult thing about the Reader's Cup is that we have little to no idea as to what the questions we will be asked will include. We were given a short pre-competition that gave us a few ideas but they were based on short stories with fewer characters. 
I will be using my note-taking revision technique for the books, and may use Quizlet flashcards to explore characters and settings. 
As a team we are planning to get together to share our summaries of the books we are reading, and at the end when we have all read the books we will compare notes and reviews.

I have made steady progress on the Reader's Cup so far. 

I have finished my first book, Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy, and am aiming to begin taking notes and re-reading it chapter by chapter this week, finishing up with a book review at the very end of the school holidays. 

I don't plan on reviewing every book I read, however these school holidays have thankfully given me a lot of free time to spend doing extra work for school and making goals for the new term.