Develop a Mindset of success in your students as they prepare for exams.

It is easy to feel that people are born good at certain things. Lots of students still believe this because they see others around them learn things quickly and succeed effortlessly. What they don’t know is what that person is thinking that makes them so effective.

Mindset is crucial to success. There is so much research today on the importance of a Growth Mindset, but so many people have not developed it yet. Do some of your students have a Fixed Mindset? Do they believe they can’t do things? Are they set in their beliefs, that things are simply too hard for them to do?

Every school has students with Fixed Mindsets. The question is how do you develop a Growth Mindset – one that believes that with hard work and effort, anything is possible?

Raising awareness of this idea can be the first step to sow the seed for change. Next you need a structured programme to use in the weeks leading up to the exams to get them to think differently.

Our solution comes in the form of eight worksheets in a ready-made booklet – ‘Greatest Strength Workbook for Students’. It comes with a free teacher’s guide and is available as an instant download. The teacher’s guide and a sample can be downloaded for free to get you started. The full license to print for use with your whole school is only £49.99.

Helping students learn to overcome stress, teaching them to motivate themselves, encouraging them to plan for the future and develop confidence to try new things are essential skills. They help to build mental resilience and enhance overall mental well-being; together they develop a Growth Mindset.

To develop these skills, students must explore them. Finding time in the school day to focus on these areas can be challenging and you may not have the resources or ideas to hand to achieve the desired result. But could you find ten minutes to introduce an activity that was already prepared?

The full details are available at: http://newset-training.com/students.html

Thanks and I wish your students the best for their up-coming exams.

Clare Martin

Newset Training

Of course, it is a fact that most test and exam papers require handwritten answers, and so good handwriting continues to make an impact and helps to deliver extra marks.

But there is more. For learning to write by hand improves literacy, understanding and comprehension. Indeed those who have been taught and encouraged to write by hand have been shown to find deciphering hard-to-read messages easier than those who have not.

Other studies show a positive link between hand-eye coordination and whether a child has been taught to write with a form of cursive handwriting.

Most surprisingly, it is now being suggested in academic studies that whether the individual uses the pen or the keyboard to write even affects the way the individual thinks.

One research paper suggests that university students who use pen and paper to make notes during lectures do better than those who make notes on a laptop.

In some ways we should not be too surprised by some of these findings, for handwriting requires a greater level of hand-eye coordination than typing on a keyboard, and thus, as well as helping with exam scores, good handwriting gives students the chance to develop their essential fine motor skills.

But many young people today are brought up in homes where handwriting is limited to little more than the production of shopping lists – and indeed many people now type these into their mobile phones.

It is for all of these reasons that Multi-Sensory Learning produced the Handwriting Rescue Scheme for fully cursive handwriting.

The scheme, which is available as a photocopiable program supplied on CD or as printed sheets, contains over 300 structured exercises designed to establish complete cursive letter formation.

And there is a particular bonus here, for tests have shown that the use of such material encourages the development of an automatic response to frequently used spelling choices. In other words, by practising their handwriting pupils also learn their spellings.

To see a sample of this resource please email us at msl@schools.co.uk

You can also find more information on our website.

The resource is available as a download for £39.99 (EUR 55.29).

Payment is required in Pounds Sterling and can be made through the website by clicking here.

You can then click on the International option and pay by credit card, debit card or Paypal.