Working from home if your school is closed

The aim of this blog post is to give you some ideas of what you can do to stay fresh for when you return to school because, and this is very important, we will get over this and life will return to normal, even as if that seems a long way away at the moment.

Firstly, my biggest piece of advice is to get some structure in your day. The school day is structured. You get up, have breakfast, travel to school, go to lessons, have a break, more lessons, lunch, etc. Try to get this routine into your life. Get up at a decent time (please don’t lie in until midday or beyond). At some point the day before, plan out your day. What are you going to do or study? What time are you going to do this from? When will you have morning break or lunch?

Secondly, from the chemistry point of view, start each session by giving yourself a mental workout. Get a copy of the subject guide and look at the guidance section of the syllabus. Spend five spend minutes going back over straight forward material – for example, what are the states of matter and names given to each interconversion? List as many polyatomic ions as you can (and then check them). What is the definition for enthalpy of combustion or formation? What does SN1 or SN2 mean? And so on.

Thirdly, still using the chemistry guide, do some reading on topics you have not covered yet. Do this in an ordered way. For example, if you go up to topic 6.1 before you found yourself at home, don’t press on to topic 8. Carry on from where you are. In order to help with this, use your text book and I would recommend Richard Thronely’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/richthornley).

Finally, try questions. Use the text book but also, if you are able to access them, use some past paper questions and check your answers.

If you are in touch with your friends, why not get together for a video conference using an online platform. Zoom seems to make this easy (https://zoom.us/). One of you could write a quiz for the others. You could share it via Kahoot (https://kahoot.com/blog/2016/04/28/making-kahoot-get-started-kahoot-creator/)

Good luck! Don’t forget to read our blog posts to help to improve your chemistry knowledge as well. If you have any good ideas for working at home, please post them below as we would all love to hear them.

In the meantime, please stay safe and stay positive.