Learning by yourself

Here are a few simple ideas that will help you start off your project and stay motivated.

Take control of your own work and decide how to organise it – work out what you are going to do, what order it needs to be done in and who to ask for help when you get stuck.
Work out what you already know about a subject and what you still need to learn. This is called metacognition and it is a very important skill to develop.
Think about what types of thinking you are using at each step, this will help improve your metacognition – see Thinking about your thinking for advice on how to do this.
Write down questions you want to ask and ideas on how to solve the problem – what are the most important questions to answer and which order should you answer them in?
Once you have written down your ideas, work out which ones are connected and keep noting down ideas and questions as they occur to you.
Make sure you take time out to think about what you have done so far. Work out what went well and what could have gone better.
Always think about how you are going to explain your ideas to other people and the evidence you will use to back up your ideas. Try talking it through to yourself or try to explain it to someone else, a friend, a parent or a teacher.
Take risks with your learning – try something unusual out – what have you got to lose?
Make sure you assess you own work and think about how you could improve in the future – no one is perfect! Assessing my project will help you understand how to judge how well you have done.