How to build a weekly study plan for LGS

This article is a practical guide to help students and parents manage the process with more structure. An 8th grader preparing for LGS, Turkey's high-school entrance exam, shares the week between school, homework, rest and exam preparation. A good weekly plan brings those pieces together without letting them crush each other.

First, see your time

The first step towards a realistic plan is not writing an imaginary schedule; it's seeing how the current week actually goes. For one week, take notes day by day: When does school end? How long is the commute? When are dinner, rest and sleep? How much time goes to the phone and screens?

This log usually reveals two things: there is less "free" time than assumed, and part of the time that does exist quietly evaporates. When you build the plan on this real picture, the question "why can't I stick to my plan?" largely disappears.

Fixed and flexible blocks

Divide the week into two kinds of blocks. Fixed blocks don't move: school hours, sleep, meals, any courses or lessons, rest. Put these into the calendar first and leave them alone. Sleep is not a reserve to be raided; in an exam year, regular sleep is a precondition for learning to stick.

What remains becomes flexible study blocks. Split them into focused chunks of 40–50 minutes and give each one a single job: "maths, factorisation revision", "Turkish, 20 reading questions". Vague goals like "study" make a block unproductive; one measurable task makes both starting and finishing easier.

Spread subjects across the week: rather than burying a day in one subject, give a day at most two or three different subjects, and put the hardest one in the hours when the mind is freshest.

A revision day is a must

Dedicate one day of the week, Saturday or Sunday for most students, not to new topics but to revision and gap-closing. Three jobs belong to this day: a quick review of the week's topics, re-solving the questions that went wrong, and a look over next week's plan.

When the revision day is skipped, topics pile up and the feeling that "everything is missing" grows. Regular revision does the opposite, it makes progress visible: solving this week the question you couldn't solve last week is the most reliable source of motivation there is.

A sample week:

• Monday, Maths: topic revision · Turkish: reading practice
• Tuesday, Science: new topic · Maths: problem practice
• Wednesday, Turkish: grammar · Rest / free
• Thursday, Maths: gap topic · Science: practice
• Friday, Light revision · Early rest
• Saturday, Mock exam · Mock exam review
• Sunday, Weekly revision · Next week's plan

The table is a template; blocks and subjects change with the student's own schedule.

Common mistakes

Packing the plan too tight. A schedule with no slack collapses at the first hiccup. Leave deliberate gaps; a slipped task moves into the gap and the plan survives.

Studying only the favourite subject. The plan exists to protect balance. The difficult subject can take the best hours of the week; the favourite can live in the tired ones.

Keeping the plan in your head. An unwritten plan is a wish whose execution depends on the mood of the moment. Write the plan down and put it somewhere visible above the desk.