The Lanterna Blog
Below you will find in-depth reports, thought pieces on modern education, as well as hundreds of tips on how to excel at the IB.
Having an IB meltdown? Use mindfulness to cut your stress levels and boost your productivity!
As an IB student, chances are you know how it feels to have a million things buzzing around your mind – IA deadlines, CAS projects, ToK, how not to fail maths, EE… but you can’t seem to concentrate on any of them for long enough to get the job done! Instead, you sit there feeling…
The Extended Essay Step-by-Step Guide 2: Your Topic
There is a secret that could help all you first year IB students out there. It is the key to making next year a whole lot easier. It will reduce stress, make the workload easier to handle, and give you time. What is the secret? It’s that you’re better off starting the Extended Essay as soon…
Using the Syllabus as a Science Revision Tool
Not all IB students realise this, but the syllabus is a precious gift bestowed upon all students by the IB Powers-That-Be. If used wisely, syllabuses can be extremely powerful revision tools. Particularly for ‘fact-heavy’ subjects like the sciences, syllabuses contain pretty much everything you’ll need to know on exam day to achieve top marks, sometimes…
Master the IB in 3 Simple Steps
We’ve all had that problem. We’re sitting in a lesson. We’re following what the teacher is saying. But there’s something that we just can’t get our head around. The binomial distribution maybe, or Plato’s Theory of Forms. We try to reread what we’ve just written in our notes. We think it through and… blank. It’s…
Sleep Smart – 4 Tech Tips to Hack Your Sleep and get those 8 Hours
Sleep is important. We all know this. Thanks to PhD students at MIT, we now understand that it is whilst we are asleep that our brain’s prefrontal cortex shifts all of the information we learn in a school day to the file marked ‘long-term memory’, ready to be accessed when those final exams eventually roll…
Organisation: A Guide for the Disorganised IB Student
There’s one thing that I truly believe is consistent among all the IB students who get the highest grade. And that’s organisation. Some of them would argue that they’re not organised at all. That their notes are messy, they don’t make schedules, or they feel they’re all over the place. But what I said still…
6 Steps to the Perfect Study Environment
If you can concentrate you can learn quickly. If you can learn quickly you can ace your studies. So the obvious question is…how do you concentrate. One of the most important factors affecting your concentration is your environment. In this post, we’re going to examine the main characteristics of the perfect study environment. Then we’re…
The Art of Making Awesome Notes
I feel like the art of note-taking, or at least of taking effective notes, is often underestimated. Yes, almost all of us make them in lessons, but it’s easy to forget how valuable they can be later on. Making awesome notes in the IB is especially important, as there is so much information across the…
3 Last Minute Essay Boosting Tips
What are the tricks to make an essay better fast? In this post I’m going to describe the things you can quickly do to massively improve the quality of your essay. This might be especially useful at this time of year. You might have a lot of deadlines. You might have to submit ToK essays,…
We need to talk about stress
No, really. Those of us at Lanterna have been visiting a fair number of schools recently and it seems like a lot of students, at all stages of the IB, are stressed at the moment. Maybe it’s the season, maybe it’s this particular time in the course, but I think it would do us all…
