Sixth Form Essentials

Hello my lovelies. Today is a post about the things that I will most definitely be using when I return to Sixth Form in September. Starting last year, I had no idea of the things I would need but now I have a much clearer idea of the things that are essentials so I decided to share that with you!

General Must-Haves!

The first item that you will most definitely want during your time in the Sixth Form is a good pair of headphones or earbuds. I opted for the House of Marley ‘Little Bird’ earphones as my boyfriend has a pair from the company and these were within my budget. Mine are in the salmon pink shade which, unusually, I love! In addition to this, a good music streaming service or making sure you have your songs on your device is crucial. I myself have used Deezer, Spotify and Apple Music- swapping to take advantage of free trials. However, for students, memberships to these sites are half price.

I think that a laptop is also very useful for Sixth Form. Most colleges have IT facilities but I do like having my own in case I need it for some reason. The laptop that I have is the Acer Chromebook 14. I love it because it has a good sized screen, a nicely spaced keyboard and the battery life is incredible! Another feature that I use is Google Drive. It is so handy to keep all of your resources in one place that is accessible from any computer or device purely by logging in with your email.

A good bag is also very important. For me, I would often have to carry textbooks and my exercise books so I needed something that would give me enough room to carry this and my personal belongings. My current backpack is from the company Spiral and I love it. It has a lovely padded laptop pouch so everything is kept safe. It is very spacious as well which is great.

Stationery

Stationery is something that I really love. I seriously cannot get enough of notebooks, pens, highlighters.. anything! My first essential is the Stabilo Pastel Highlighters. I adore these as the light shades as they aren’t as harsh when revising and I find that they don’t soak through the pages of novels as much as neon highlighters (which is great news if you are a Literature student!)

As for pens, I am quite picky about what I use. I really like the Zebra Rose Gold Ballpoints. These are super flowy black ink pens and they dry quickly which is great for someone left handed like me! I like to use less inky pens for speedier tasks or ones where I want to limit soaking. My choice for this is the Staedtler Stick Ballpoint. I only ever write in black as I think it is useful to get into practise before exams.

Note Taking

For my notes, I preferred to use exercise books, here I will describe how it worked for English Literature. I would have one exercise book per novel as well as running a folder in tandem for any handouts or revision resources. I used this system for all of my subjects. I would divide the folders into the topics and then make sure that everything was filed correctly.

To make sure I never left anything behind, I would have a day folder. In here, I would keep the paperwork associated to the current topic in each subject and then when a topic was over, I would move it to the master folder.

I hope this post has been useful to you, or could be for somebody that you know (in which case, feel free to share it!)

Until next time,

Chantelle xx