Child of the sky

here is my brand new challenge! i’ve known that i was going to do this challenge since i started my summer challenge in july so i am so psyched to be able to finally share it with you guys! i hope that you will enjoy it <3

DISCLAIMER: lots of the prompts in December are to do with Christmas because that is what i celebrate at this time of year. i was very aware of that when i was writing the prompts but i did not think that knew enough about other festivals and holidays at this time to write prompts about them. i did not want any prompts i made to be disrespectful. if you don’t celebrate Christmas, please know that this challenge is still for you! you can either just use the prompts anyway (if they are applicable) or adapt them to fit the festival or holiday that you celebrate. if it is impossible to adapt, then simply tell me about what you celebrate because i am excited to learn about them! [this was edited later because i realised i forgot to add it - thank you to the anon who queried this issue for reminding me <3]

✨ Info ✨

If you do the challenge, use the tag #winter studying challenge so i (and others) can see your posts. I try to reblog as many as possible. 

This challenge will run for two months - from the 1st December to the 31st January

There are daily prompts for every day of December and January 

But as always I don’t expect everyone to be able to post every day so you can always do catchup posts!

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask!

✨ Rules ✨

If you want to do the challenge, please reblog this post

If you do it on any other social media platform (ie. Instagram), please give credit. You can find my instagram here - my username is the same as on here @myhoneststudyblr

The challenge will officially start on the 1st December, but if you come across this later, you can definitely start anytime during these two months!

✨ Prompts ✨

1st December - Do you like winter?

2nd December - What is your favourite thing about winter?

3rd December - What is your least favourite thing about winter?

4th December - What is an unpopular opinion that you have about winter? 

5th December - Are you usually busy during winter?

6th December - Do you get a break from school/uni/work during winter?

7th December - How do you stay motivated during winter?

8th December - When should people start preparing for, decorating and celebrating Christmas? 

9th December - What do you usually do during the holidays?

10th December - What is a cherished family tradition from your childhood?

11th December - What is a favourite family Christmas/holiday memory that has stuck with you through the years? Why?

12th December - Does your family have any odd traditions during the holidays?

13th December - When do you buy your Christmas presents?

14th December - Share a memorable gift-opening moment from your childhood.

15th December - What is the coolest gift you ever gave someone?

16th December - What is your favourite Christmas movie?

17th December - What is your favourite Christmas song/carol? 

18th December - What is a Christmas song that makes you cringe?

19th December - What is your favourite holiday food?

20th December - What is your least favourite holiday food?

21st December - What was the most memorable holiday celebration you had at school?

22nd December - Finish this thought, “It wouldn’t be Christmas without _____.”

23rd December - If you could design your own ugly Christmas sweater, what would it look like?

24th December - What is your Christmas wish?

25th December - Merry Christmas! Tell us about your day!

26th December - What do you do the day after Christmas?

27th December - What was the best moment 

28th December - What are you grateful for?

29th December - Christmas or New Years

30th December - What is your best memory from 2020?

31st December - Would you rather stay home or go out on New Year’s Eve?

1st January - Happy New Year! What did you learn in the past year? 

2nd January - Have you made any New Years’ Resolutions?

3rd January - What is your aim for 2021?

4th January - What is the most important thing that is going to happen to you this year?

5th January - Would you rather live in a world where it is always winter or always summer?

6th January - What is the weather like during winter in your country?

7th January - Do you like the cold?

8th January - Where is the coldest place you’ve ever been to?

9th January - Name one place you could never live because of the winter weather.

10th January - Have you ever seen snow? When was the last time you saw it?

11th January - Would you rather play in the rain or play in a snowstorm?

12th January - Would you rather have a snowball fight or build a big snowman?

13th January - Would you rather have an entire snow week off from school or an extra week of summer vacation?

14th January - What is your favourite winter outfit?

15th January - Would you rather wear a winter jacket in the summer or a bathing suit in the winter?

16th January -  Scarves or sweaters? 

17th January - Gloves or mittens?

18th January - Wear mittens forever or a winter hat every single day?

19th January - What outdoor winter activity do you love?

20th January - Do you do any winter sports?

21st January - Stay warm inside or go outside in the cold?

22nd January - Ice skate or rollerblade?

23rd January - Polar bear or penguin?

24th January - Arctic fox or snowy owl?

25th January - What is your favourite winter drink?

26th January - Live in a world without hot chocolate or only be able to drink hot apple cider?

27th January - Have icy blue skin or have a runny nose all the time?

28th January - Play in the snow or play in the sand?

29th January - Go skiing or snowboarding?

30th January - Have a birthday in winter or in summer?

31st January - What was your favourite thing about winter this year?

✨ and that is the challenge! i really hope you will enjoy my challenge and if you have any questions, remember you can always send me an ask! ✨

[taglist beneath the cut]

How i make my study guides

I have my first university exam on Monday, so I decided to try my hand and make my own revision guide a few days ago and so far it has really helped guide my revision. Here is how I created my own study guide:

Gather all your notes. All your lecture notes, tutorial notes and textbook     notes. Sort them into to piles such as topic piles/weekly piles or chapter     piles – whatever makes sense for you, just make sure all the stuff that is     related and on the same topic is together.

Look at how many pages you have and work out how many pages you want to compile it down to. I tired to keep mine to 1 – 2 pages per topic or at least half the amount of pages i began with, so that meant i had to fit my information into about 8 pages at most.

Sort through the information and work out the important stuff. You can     highlight the information, cross out the unnecessary information or take     note of the sub topics you want to have. Just make sure the key points of each topic/sub heading is there.

Heavily summarise the information! This is the most important thing! You need to be able to take the paragraph or 10 dot points and make it into a 1 - 3 sentences or 2 - 5 dot points. This process is under the ‘active learning’ category as you are actively thinking about the subject and summarising it into your own condense set of words. So technically you are studying the information while making the guide!

Organise the information and make it look nice. Work out what sub headings you want, if you want any diagrams to go with the information or if you want the information to be in a table form. Input your summarised information into to the format you have decided and make sure it looks nice and makes sense to you, so you will be motivated to look over the information.

Print it out and use it! There’s no point spending 6 hours like I did to make a study guide if you are going to use it.

Here are some pictures of my study guide. I was able to condense my information from 16+ pages (I already summaries my notes each week, let me know if you want to see how I take notes : ) ) down to 8.

Hey guys, it’s been a while. I’m in my second semester of college now, realizing that my school stationery days are coming closer and closer to the end.

Everyone has their different tactics for notetaking, and although I have been an absolute stationery fiend since I was a kid, I noticed I prefer taking notes in class with just pen and paper, no real fancy sticky notes, index cards, tabs, or washi tape. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When I was a sophomore in High School, a friend and I would go into NYC often during the summer (we live 15 miles outside the city) and literally RAID the muji stores STUFFING OUR SHOPPING BAGS WITH STATIONERY AND OTHER SUPPLIES. We would walk all the way from the financial district and hit up EVERY muji store until 42nd street. (That’s over 50 New York blocks WALKING because him and I were too shy to flag down a taxi—- and at this time there were only 4 mujis in our area, now there are 6.)

So I have, like, 30 muji pens, 15 notebooks, maybe 30 altogether if you count the various sizes, TONS of little sticky notes (like the infamous cat sticky notes that muji carries) sticky tabs, special letter writing stationery, all sorts of stuff!!

And over the years I’ve also had the opportunity to shop at various Japanese and Korean markets and stores that carry ENDLESS supplies of kawaii themed stationery.

I don’t need this stuff in my life anymore and for the past 3 years it’s all been stowed away nicely and untouched as desk accessories.

I would like to hand down these items to MULTIPLE lucky winners of a giveaway I had in mind.

Because I have SO MUCH muji stationery and other kawaii stationery, the giveaway prizes would be randomized but equally divided as much as possible. And based on the popularity of products (like the popular pens and notebooks) I would make sure each winner gets at least one or two of those “special items”.

^^^ I know that this is a really ugly pic but I just spent some time hauling out the HUGE load of unused (or very lightly used) stationery that is just laying around my house. Everything is in super good if not perfect condition, and anything that has writing in it will NOT be included in the giveaway. (Obviously)

What prizes are included?

Muji pens

Muji notebooks (in various sizes)

Muji sticky notes

Muji notepads

Muji highlighters

Muji lettersets (mini and standard size)

Muji erasers

Kawaii themed stationery:

Rilakkuma

Pom Pom purin

Sumikko gurashi

Kakao Friends (possibly, not sure if I’ll give it up hah)

EXCLUSIVE Studio Ghibli stationery found in the Japan store in Epcot, Disney World

Kiki’s Delivery Service and Totoro

Moleskine notebooks!

Special art markers (similar to mildliners)

And I’m still going through A LOT of my stuff so there will be more, I may have some pencil cases to give away!!!!

How do I enter???

All you have to do is reblog this post!! I want it to get lots of exposure so I can get rid of this stuff!

You don’t even have to follow me if you don’t want to. But I will say that in the future I will be doing a special Pusheen Box giveaway as well! (Probably in May!)

Deadline:

I will announce SIX (6) winners on March 15th AT RANDOM from the list of reblog s this post gets.

I will message each of the six winners for their mailing addresses, if a winner doesn’t respond by March 17th, then I will go on to a different random entry.

Please get this around the studyblr community, I hate seeing my lovely stationery untouched and unused, it breaks my heart. :”( It would mean a lot if you could reblog this for entry!!

Everyone have a lovely day and also, it won’t count as an additional entry, but if you follow my Instagram @jesspurr I will be posting my own hand drawn stationery and probably more pics of the giveaway prizes from there! (As well as on this tumblr account).

Also, part of it is that the sooner I get rid of these supplies, the better! (For me, personally). And I am making plans to go out of the country during the deadline (it just came up) and I want to be reliable to have the items shipped!

Thank you all for the kind comments along the way, I’m glad I can offer these products and prizes to people who either can’t access them due to location or don’t have the funds.

I also forgot to mention that some of the muji notebooks I own have some stamps on them. (When in the store, you can decorate the notebooks you buy with special stamps) I stamped the notebooks I have with a subject line/callout bubble type of thing.

All of the large notebooks are stamped with the callout bubble, a symbol in the bottom corner, and the word “arigatou” in hiragana. (“Thank you”) I think it just adds some quirkiness to the notebooks, but if you don’t like it, the other side is blank and the notebooks are reversible.

Here are more prize pics:

^^^ so as you can see I stamped a lot of my muji notebooks but they’re still 100% usable.

I also have more spiral notebooks that I used for class but only used maybe at most 5 pages out of them. However, I wrote on the covers the subjects of the classes like “communications” or “psychology”. In the pic above, you can see I tried to stamp my name, “Jess” on one of the covers of the small notebooks (and failed) 😂 But it’s still blank inside and in good condition! For these notebooks that have writing on the covers, I’ll be sending additional blank white labels so you can cover up the words! (Unless maybe you have a communications or psych class? Lol)

Anyway, I just want everyone to know and want to desperately emphasize the fact that

Everything I’m giving away IS SECONDHAND. Most of it is in unused or lightly used condition but that DOES NOT mean it’s NEW.

I’m getting all these sweet comments but please know that what you’re getting isn’t entirely new! (Some of it might be ;D)

Also want to share these adorable add ons:

These are one of my favorite sticky notes from Muji and I found I have 3 of each so every winner will get one of one or the other. :-)

Updating this week’s log cause I got new and extremely difficult music in the post!!

6.10.17 || these pics are heavily edited oml I practiced for an hour today but forgot to do my etude and scales oops 

Taking textbook notes is a chore. It’s tedious and boring and sometimes challenging, but hopefully these tips will help you improve your skill and shorten the time it takes you to do textbook notes!

Give yourself time: Realistically, you can’t knock out 30 pages of notes in 20 minutes. Take your time with textbook notes so they’re a good studying tool in the future. The general rule is to take how many pages you have to do and multiply it by 5: that’s how many minutes it’ll take you to do the notes.

Also, divide you notes up into manageable chunks to increase your productivity. I am personally a huge fan of using pomodoro timers, and I adjust the intervals for however long I need to.

Skim before you start taking notes: If time is an issue, don’t read your 40 page in depth before even picking up a pen, but make sure you know what you’re reading about by skimming a bit ahead of your notes. Read over section titles, and look at charts, maps, or graphs. Writing and highlighting as you read the chapter for the first time isn’t effective because you don’t know if a sentence will be important or not, so make sure you’re reading a paragraph or section in advance before writing.

Use the format they give you in the book to help take your notes: In a lot of textbooks, there will be a mini outline before the chapter itself that shows all the headings and subheadings. Those will be your guidelines! I find this super helpful because long chapters can be daunting to go into without any structure. If you don’t have one of those, use the headings and subheadings provided for you. If you haven’t already been doing this, it will help you so much.

Read actively: It’s so easy to “read” a textbook without digesting any information, but that is the last thing you want to do. Not only does it make taking notes a million times harder, but you’ll be lost in class discussions because you didn’t understand the reading. To keep from passively reading, highlight, underline, star any important information in the book itself.

Have a color coding system for highlighting or underlining and write down a key somewhere (here’s a few that you can adjust for your needs: x,x)

Use sticky notes or tabs to mark any questions or important points to come back to

Summarize important information and paraphrase: When taking the actual notes, don’t copy down full sentences word for word. Not only does writing full sentences waste a lot of time, it’s not an effective way to learn. If you can paraphrase the information, then you understand it. It’s also easier to study notes which are in your own words instead of textbook academia writing.

Be selective: You shouldn’t be writing down every fact that comes up in your textbook. If a fact ties into the bigger topic and provides evidence, then it’s probably something to keep, but you don’t need every piece of supplemental information (but do make sure you always write down the vocab). Learn your teacher’s testing style to help you decide what to write down. Could this be on the quiz/test? If the answer is yes, make sure you write it down.

Learn to abbreviate: Just like writing full sentences, writing out full words will waste time. Implement some shortenings (make sure to use ones that you’ll understand later!) into your notes. Some common ones are: b/c=because, gov=government, w/o=without, and here’s a great list of a ton of examples of abbreviations and shortenings.

Answer margin and review questions: A lot of textbooks have margin questions on every page or so that sum up what’s really important about that information. Make sure not to skip them because they’re really helpful for understanding. Write them down and answer them clearly in your notes. Most textbooks also have review questions after the chapter that check for reading comprehension, so make sure to answer those because they’ll show you if you really understood the chapter.

Don’t skip over visual sources: Maps, diagrams, illustrations, charts, and any other visuals in textbooks are so helpful. If you’re a visual learner, these things will be so essential to you and how you understand what you’re reading. Charts, tables, and diagrams sometimes also summarize information, so if you’re a visual learner it might benefit you to copy those down instead of writing it out.

Add visuals if it’ll help you: As said above, copying down charts, tables, illustrations, or diagrams can be super helpful for visual learners. They’re clear and concise, so pay attention to them.

Write your notes in a way that’s effective and makes sense to you: Mindmaps, Cornell notes, or plain outline notes are all really good forms of notetaking. Find which one works best for you to understand them and which one is most effective for your class, and use it (stuff on mindmaps and cornell notes).

A few of you have been asking about ways to revise (that’s not just making notes). Here’s a list of some different techniques you can use to revise/study:

Notes - making notes is the ‘standard’ way of studying - summarising information from textbooks/revision guides into your own words

Mind-maps - making these is a great way to organise ideas and link different ideas

Posters - big and colourful posters are a great way to summarise info as well as a more fun way of working

Teaching - teaching others (anyone who will listen to you will do) is a great way, as it will really show whether you really know the info by how well you can explain it to someone who knows nothing about it

Videos - watching videos can be a nice and easy way to revise, and are useful for visual and/or auditory learners

Podcasts - you can download and listen to podcasts when you are walking to school etc. which is a great way to get extra revision in, and they’re great for auditory learners

Flashcards - these can be useful for making really concise notes, as well as making Q&A or key word and definition cards - they are also really compact so you can take them with you

Group study - working with friends can help bounce ideas off each other, bringing up things you might not have thought about alone - you will all have different strengths that will help each other out

Past questions - doing past papers and looking at mark schemes will help your timings and application of knowledge/exam technique

Write (don’t type) - making notes on tablets/laptops is fine, but when it comes to writing practise essays always write because that’s what you will be doing in the exam (unless you use a laptop for some reason) so it’s best to practise for timings etc.

Further reading - reading articles and books around the subject areas will give you a broader idea of the concepts and a better overall understanding

Accents/voices - some people find using different accents or characters of voices helps them remember things (in the exam you can recall info because you remember you said it in an Australian accent for example)

Key word lists - making lists of words and definitions can be useful, as using key words in context in essays/questions is what gets you the higher marks

Post-it notes - writing key ideas on post-it notes and sticking them in places you go commonly (on the fridge, by the light switch, in your bedroom, on the TV etc) 

Apps - there are loads of great apps that you can download to make notes and flashcards etc. as well as apps for generally increasing your productivity - see my studying apps post here

Songs/mnemonics - making funny little songs to remember processes can be really useful, as they really stick in your head

how i study: mathematics [click for higher res.] —t.k