Study Tips

First off, thanks for clicking on this page! Math is a deep subject that sometimes needs you to take a break before returning to solve a problem. Below you will find tips and tricks that have helped me as a student and have helped my students be successful and confident in their learning.

1. Take a break

When you are stressed, hungry, sleepy, or pushing yourself, your brain needs a break before it will do its best work. It is okay to take a nap, eat a snack or a meal with family, talk to someone, work on a different assignment, or even go to sleep and come back to the problem the next morning! Just make sure you come back to it :)

If you want to read articles about this, go to google.com and search "overworking your brain and math homework".

2. Spend time with your notes

The more you use your senses (and the more sense you use), the more information will be filed away in your brain. Remember that the 5 sense are tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing. I do not recommend you eat your notes, but you can read them out loud to yourself for 5 minutes every day before you go to sleep. Reading out loud lets you see your notes, hear your notes, and "taste" your notes. You can even follow along with your finger as you read to "touch" your notes! If you want to go above and beyond, write in a scented pen, marker, or use a scented highlighter to smell your notes. Research says that there are scents to boost your memory.

If you want to read articles about these suggestions, go to google.com and search "smells that help you remember more for tests", "sensee help you remember", "use as many senses as possible to learn".

3. Reimagine your notes

There are more specific note-taking strategies in the Strategies drop down menu. This study tip is for what to do with your notes AFTER you take them. Imagine you have a whole page (or two) of notes. They may be the most tidy notes on Earth or a jumble of underlines, circles, arrows, and handwriting only you can read. Either way, you can DO something with them. 

• If it is mostly vocab, make flashcards. These can be on standard index cards, scraps of paper you cut out, sticky notes, or digital ones using platforms like Quizlet. Read through them every night for a week leading up to a test or large project, quiz your friends, and have your family quiz you! 

• Another idea is to rewrite your notes into a concept map. Start with the main idea in a circle in the middle of a piece of paper. Draw lines and bubbles out from that concept that relate. Connect related ideas with more lines to see how they all work together. 

• Draw a picture (ex: political cartoons) that would tell a story about the notes. Include easter eggs in the background that refer to different parts of the notes and help make a larger picture of the concept you learned.

• If you are short on time and love colors, create a key to simply annotate your notes. For example, green could be for vocabulary, yellow for overarching concepts, pink for times/dates/places, and orange for examples. Add in circles, underlining, starring, or other func shapes when you run out of colors! For math specifically, theorems and vocabulary are really key things to annotate so they are easier to refer to later.

• Another quick idea is to write a summary of what you learned. Try to include AS MANY vocabulary terms as possible IN CONTEXT so they become more familiar to you.

If you want to read articles about these suggestions, go to google.com and search "why are notes helpful".