Student Nurse

madwife2002, BSN, RN · Oct 2, 2015

Hi Welcome to allnurses, I have moved your thread to the LPN student nurse forum

Dorali, BSN, LPN, RN · Oct 9, 2015

Have you tried using Quizlet for flashcards? Either make your own or search and see if someone has already made them for whichever class/chapters you are taking; that's happened for me a LOT. Sometimes, instead of writing out notes, I type them up in Quizlet so that i can use them as flashcards and study that. Quizlet has a smartphone app that will read your flashcards to you. I have a 45 minute drive to school so that helps me more than I can say. You can create an account for free, it doesn't cost anything to use it.

Let's see, we have a PowerPoint for each chapter we work on that is a good review right before you test. Sometimes they'll have stuff in them that i didn't remember seeing in the chapters.

Read the review/bullet points at the end of your chapters.

Go over the key terms for your chapter (Quizlet is good for this too).

If you do study guides/work sheets, read over those.

Any time you can read a rationale, DO IT! If i could have a book just with rationales, I would jump all over it! Lol

That's all I can think of right now. If you'll post what you're already doing, maybe we can come up with something that will help you elaborate on it.

WereBadger · Oct 10, 2015

I just finished my LPN program this past summer and wrote the NCLEX-PN earlier today (!) so I'm hoping that some of my advice might be useful to you. :)

What I found worked for me with studying was actually "teaching" the material to my husband, my cats, my dogs...you get the idea. I would literally discuss different concepts whenever I could and I found that having someone ask me questions about it really helped me to gain a more thorough knowledge of the subject. I also took a LOT of notes; not only in class, but as I was reading through the material again at home after class and before our weekly exam. Somehow seeing the information in my own handwriting and connecting with it through re-writing it (in words/ terminology which made sense to me) helped. I limited my use of flashcards, and only really used them for important lab values and medical terminology that I knew that was important. Don't get sucked into the trap of making tons of flashcards every week and thinking that memorizing every word is important-- your critical thinking skills will get you further.

Routine was also really important to me; I had a set number of hours that I would review class material every day, and I kept all of my textbooks and notebooks in an accessible (and highly visible) place where it was easy to sit down for half an hour at a time and just go over things. I found that tripping over my materials served as a good motivation to study. As you start clinicals this routine is going to be really important, as your care plans are going to take up a lot more time than you might think.

Good luck! You CAN do this! Please let me know how things are going for you.

WereBadger · Nov 22, 2015

How have things been going for you, jordankb?