I wrote a post yesterday about the Activate 2 Student Book and mentioned we were using it with the Activate 2 Workbook for our Year 8 Science. This post is about the workbooks (there are 2 different versions). But to start with I want to clarify something just in case you did not read the Student Book post – The Student Book is the colourful explanation book – it explains the concepts and does have a few questions. The Workbooks are black and white question books. The workbooks do not contain explanations. They are question books. I just want to make that clear before I start explaining what is in the workbook and how the 2 workbooks differ.

The Workbooks are written to go with the Student Book. So the workbooks cover the exact topics in the exact order as the Student Book. They do work really well together. The general layout of the workbooks is – they are split into the same 3 categories same as the student book – Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Those 3 categories are then split into chapters and each chapter is split into topics. Each topic has 1 page of questions and at the end of each chapter there is a Pinchpoint Question which highlights a difficult concept (I think these Pinchpoint questions are really good at making the kids think). Then at the end of each Category there are Revision questions and a Checklist. It works out to be just over 100 pages of Science questions (I think 100 pages of Science questions for £4.99 is a very good price). And at the back of the book they have all the answers. (Again I want to clarify the workbooks contain the answers for the questions in the workbook and NOT the answers for the questions in the student book.) And both workbooks follow the same layout.

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Now there are 2 different workbooks.  The two workbooks are Activate 2 Intervention Workbook (Foundation) (Chandlergrevatt) and Activate 2 Intervention Workbook (Higher) (Chandlergrevatt). The foundation workbook does have easier questions and each page in the foundation workbook contains a block at the bottom called “What You Need to Remember”. Which is a good summary. The questions in the Foundation workbook tend to be more – circle the right answer, draw a line matching the definition, put in correct order type questions.  There are not a lot of sentence writing questions in the foundation book. The Higher workbook does have a few of the shorter type questions but they contain a lot of sentence, explanation questions. I am including a slideshow below showing the same pages in the Foundation book verses the Higher workbook to show you the difference.

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I always think pictures show the differences better so I hope that helps.

I actually have both workbooks and I had two reasons why I wanted both workbooks. Firstly my kids are different ages, my oldest is Year 8 whereas my youngest is actually Year 5 but he likes to work through the Science with his sister.  So I thought my oldest could work through the questions in the Higher workbook and I could give some of the pages out of the Foundation to my youngest (he is 3 academic years below his sister so I don’t expect him to work at her stage but at the same time I like him to have some questions to answer). The other reason was the flexibility to use both books with my oldest (especially on topics my daughter is not confident in – she is not that keen on chemistry). I thought for some areas we could first do the page in the Foundation book and then try the page in the Higher book.  Most of the pages have different questions so it is not too repetitive if you do this (I have just seen a few label the diagram type questions that are the same in the Higher and Foundation books). So far we are using a mix of both ideas and it is working really well, I am enjoying the fact that I have both of the workbooks.

The reason why I ended up buying the Activate 1 Workbook last year was time management.  We were working through the student book and then I was looking for questions to print out for my daughter online.  And it really was just a time consuming process.  For the cost of £4.99 for a workbook which contains answers I definitely saved myself a lot of time so this year there was no doubt that I wanted the workbook and the student book.

I really do think the workbooks work well with the student book and I hope I have helped to show you the differences between the two workbooks.

You can get both workbooks directly from the Oxford University Press Website – Foundation or Higher

and you can also buy them from Amazon Activate 2 Intervention Workbook (Higher) (Chandlergrevatt) or Activate 2 Intervention Workbook (Foundation) (Chandlergrevatt).

Admin bit – I do include Affiliate links. If you follow an affiliate link and go on to purchase that product, I will be paid a very small commission, however your cost will remain the same. I only include affiliate links for products that we use and love.