Top five study activities

Hi everyone, I hope you are having a wonderful day.

It was pretty cold for me today, so I spent a lot of it studying at home at my cosy desk. My brother helped me to kit it out several months ago and I am very proud of the blue dragon and purple flower that he painted me – because who doesn’t like dragons

Today isn’t going to be about a law issue but some study activities I think could help people studying law, legal studies or another subject. Lots of articles on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, talk about study tips, which involve things like having enough water, materials and a quiet area. But very few actually discussed ‘activities’ to do while studying.

I’ve picked out a few of my favourite ideas and thought I’d share them with you as we begin the exam time crush!

1. Study Jar

First off, is the study jar. This was something that I created during the mason jar craze and because I often have ten or fifteen different projects on the go, it’s difficult to prioritise these tasks. Instead, I let the jar choose!

You don’t have to use a mason jar any kind of container will do. You’re going to want to decorate it with whatever materials you have available.

I used:

• 1 pair of scissors
• 1 patterned piece of craft paper
• 15 cm of decorative tape
• 1 ball point pen
• 1 Adhesive glitter sticker
• 1 sheet of notebook paper

Method

Firstly decorate your jar by writing any title you want with the ball point pen onto your craft paper. Tape it to the glass with your decorative tape. Next place your glitter sticker over the corner of your label.

To make the inside of the jar, write out all the projects you have to complete onto notepaper and cut them into small strips – but make sure you can read them! Then sprinkle them into the jar.

Give the jar a good shake and then pick one task out and get to work!

2.       Write your information out in a story

If you’re studying law, psychology or even medicine get your creative juices flowing and write all of your new information into a story. 

Perhaps you’re studying tax law and a businessman is cooking up a new tax evasion scheme? Or maybe you’re studying psychology and so you write a story including the exact details of impression management?

It may sound a little nerdy, but I’ve always found this is the best way to consolidate information. Similar creating a mind map, if you have a memory blank in a test just think about the story you wrote and what happened to the character in it.

3.       Go non-verbal

In a total turn around from the last tip, this one encourages you to use no words.

Method:

Make a big checklist of the key concepts (you can sometimes find this at the beginning of your textbook chapter).

Don’t write anything else, but the word is describing it and then draw all the things associated with it.

For example if I wished to draw out the ego-defensive function of an attitude I would bring a person looking proud, then a wall.

This is to represent the fact that the person is defending themselves from the harsh realities of the world by using this attitude function.

4.       Pretend you’re a talk show host

You might want to wait until no one is in the house for this!

Method

Gather all your notes and sit yourself somewhere comfortable.

Read through your notes and elaborate on them like there was an audience listening. If your textbook gives you problems to work through explaining how to solve them out loud.

This helps to reinforce your learning because you are reading and hearing the information as you apply it. Using learned information is going to be vital for your exams.

5.       Write an essay

Don’t roll your eyes too quickly! 

As I said before using information is a critical ability for exams. Recalling a heap of stuff is important but if you can’t do something useful with it you’re in a lot of troubles. So practice writing out answers to essays is invaluable.

Once you’ve finished writing put your articles in double line spacing and put corrections everywhere. You have no word limit so go crazy, add as much information as you can. 

And who knows – you might even get a head start on an assignment you didn’t know about!

Happy studying, 

 The Underage Lawyer