Welcome to my GYG!! & subject info!!

Hey guys!

I guess it is a little too later to begin a GYG, but why not start? I just read about it and would really love doing it not only to only raise my grades but to be able to talk on TSR much more!

For my first post, I'm going to give a summary of the year so far and information on the subjects I take!

(this post is going to be quite long so bear with me)

Summary of Year 10 (so far):

I've been much more organised than I did in Year 9 and been putting a bit more effort into schoolwork, but I think I need to do more just to secure my grades, especially with my mocks coming up at the end of this year which will decide the type of paper I will sit for the real GCSEs. I just feel like I need to be much more productive and I hope GYG will help me with this!!

Now here's some information on each of my subjects...

Maths:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: EdExcel

Maths hasn't been going too well this year! It hasn't been disastrous but I'm just not learning. Our teacher never actually teaches us anything so me and the rest of the class have to self teach ourselves, which isn't easy with some topics. I got a grade 5 on my last test, but it only went up to a grade 6. Year 9 maths actually felt more serious than Year 10 maths and I need to turn that around somehow.

English:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: AQA
Texts: Macbeth, Jekyll & Hyde, An Inspector Calls
Poetry Cluster: Love and Relationships

English (Language and Literature) hasn't been going awful this year and I think I'm improving as I'm learning so much more to improve my essays but I feel like I need to improve the style of my writing and write more in each paragraph. I actually did an English test today and we had to memorise quotes for Macbeth and Jekyll & Hyde. Everyone did two or three paragraphs but I wrote four - is that good or bad?? Also I forgot one of my quotes for Macbeth so I wrote something really similar with the same words.

Biology (Triple Science):
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: OCR

Well, biology has been going okay I guess. B3 is really long so we've actually only done two exams this year and our teacher is quite slow, so it's not helping. I don't feel like biology lessons are properly "structured" so again, a bit of self teaching is required but it's much easier to self teach science rather than a confusing maths concept. I feel like with subjects like these that the only way to get those grade 7s and 8s is to just focus on them a bit more.

Chemistry (Triple Science:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: OCR

Chemistry was quite tricky to get the grips with at the beginning of the year but after getting a 3 on the first exam (bad grades happen) I learned from my mistakes and for the next test I studied much harder so now I get a combination of 6s and 7s. It would be nice to get a 8, so I'll try a bit harder. Also now in chemistry we have to resit our exams if we get two grades or below from our target level. I got a 6 on the last test so I retook it on Monday and got two extra marks - but it was still a 6. I'm glad that at least the marks increased and not decreased.

Physics:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: OCR

Physics has actually been going alright this year, even though I need to increase the marks in my tests and once I even got a 8! I mainly get 6s and 7s in physics (normally for all 3 sciences to be honest) so it isn't that bad and even our usually strict physics teacher even smiles at me now so I guess parents evening next month won't be too bad - I just have to get a good result on next week's test. Our teacher is quite fast but we get the work done quickly and properly so class is fine.

Geography:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: AQA

In my school we have to choose either geography or history, and I chose geography as it's much more interesting and the GCSE content for AQA is actually really interesting and even sometimes fun to learn about all these things (not poverty and slums obviously) and alongside that you don't have to write as much. Our geography teacher makes us sheets and booklets to help us revise for our exams, and I have one on Friday. Hopefully it goes well! My grades aren't too great as they went from a 7 to a 5 so I really need to bring it back up and I have the highest target grade in the class (the really smart people in our year picked history) so when the teacher said "some of you can get grade 9" I think that applies heavily to me.

ICT:
Target Grade: 2* (not the 9-1 system)
Exam Board: OCR Nationals

ICT isn't very hard and the work often isn't too difficult and my tests have been getting some good marks, but unfortunately we aren't given grades at the moment. It's just been a good subject so far and the 50% coursework in Year 11 is helpful as well.

Spanish:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: AQA I think?

This subject is compulsory for everyone apart from really low grade students and SEN. Spanish is going alright, but not as well as I'd like to, and it's pretty hard to teach yourself as you won't have a lot of resources (well, maybe that's just me) but our lessons are totally messed up. Pretty much nearly everyone in the class have given up and most of them are in interventions. To be honest, nobody apart from me and my friend seem to care that much and our teacher is kind of helpful, but not much. Half the time we aren't learning anything and the teacher puts on Spanish films. I'm honestly not sure about getting an 8 in Spanish so I guess I need to find a help route or something, as you can't really do much about those speaking exams at home (the practising bit, not the memorising).

RS:
Target Grade: 8
Exam Board: AQA
Religions studying: Christianity and Buddhism

We do more hours of non-compulsory PE than compulsory RS, which every single person has to do. Having it once a week is a bit stupid and doesn't really help us memorise the wealth of information we need to know. We have only done one test this year which I got a grade 5 on but the average grade in the class was 4 and the highest was a 6, so I done well compared to the rest of the class. The thing is, there is only about ten questions on the test with so many marks for each, I wonder how I will be getting grade 8s? I guess I will have to put in some effort and get at least a 6 on mocks so I will have a better chance of taking the Higher exam but.. RS honestly is just a subject I have zero interest in. I guess I'll just have to stick to it, unfortunately.

And that's all my subjects! I'm sorry that this is a very long post, but I think I will update this thread every Wednesday and Sunday with all my school progress, so those ones will hopefully be a little bit shorter!

Hope you are having a great day!

MissKaboodle21 xxx

Welcome to the gyg community
These lil subject updates are great and gosh getting stuff done in year 10 is such a brilliant plan!
What’s your favourite subject?

Thank you for the comment about the subject updates! Also thank you very much for checking out my GYG! I'm trying to get revision notes and everything done for this year so I won't panic in Year 11 and my favourite subject is probably ICT