We are still new at the whole GCSE/IGCSE thing. We have only been working on our course work for 3 months now and as we continue I am sure we will change a few things but one thing I already know is TIME has become even more precious. As a home educator who is not using distance learning providers but trying to do this myself I am spending a lot of time reading up and getting myself ready for the subjects that she is doing. I want to make sure I have good background knowledge for her History and make sure I can answer and help her solve problems when it comes to her Maths and Science. And while doing all of that I also have another kiddo who is now working at KS3 level. So time is very precious for me. I need resources that are going to help and I am not interested in resources where I spend ages trying to figure out what goes where, and how does resource x link to resource y. It needs to be logical and time saving.

So with that in mind I made sure that for all her subjects we had good student books (text books) but even if you have a good student book at this level you are going to want extra resources that link in. In History we do extra reading and watch documentaries linked to our topic, in Biology we have found some great YouTube channels and in Maths we needed an extra source of questions. But the questions needed to be set out in a logical manner, and easy to find – in other words if I want questions on HCF I should just be able to look for HCF in the contents, find it, turn to the page and they should be there. And importantly I wanted the answers. At this level my daughter does the questions, marks them herself and then if she has problems or concerns comes to me. But I leave her to mark her own work, I think it is important as it shows her where she has gone wrong. So I wanted answers and I don’t mind if the answers are in a document that I download and print out, if they are in the back of a book or if they are in a separate book but I wanted answers. Wait, let me qualify that statement, I don’t mind if they are in a separate book as long as that book does not cost me £100 to buy. I am getting very irritated that lots of student books cost me £24 to buy and then they expect me to buy the answers for £100, I think that is just mean and it turns me off resources and publishers when I see that.

So considering all of that I found this. CGP’s Edexcel International GCSE Mathematics Workbook and Answer book. (The workbook costs £6.95 and the answer book is £2.00). Note – I noticed that you can get the similar Maths workbooks for the different exam boards.

It covers everything that I know we need to cover in our IGCSE Maths. And they have even marked the more challenging questions (just by highlighting the question number).

How do we use it? We tend to work through our Student Book first – our student book has the explanations, worked examples and questions. Then if we feel like we need extra practice we look up the corresponding pages in this workbook (always very easy to locate) and we do the questions in here. This is a Workbook – so it is practice questions for your kiddo to work through. There are NO explanations and no worked examples, I want to stress this – these are practice questions. But I also want to stress how useful this book has been. Maths is about understanding a concept and then being able to apply that knowledge to a question. So working through practice questions are vital. You can not do Maths without practicing it and the more you practice the easier it does become.

I am finding this workbook a great addition to our IGCSE resource collection, it is without a doubt saving me time (searching for extra Maths worksheets with answers on the internet can be very time consuming) and helping provide my daughter with the extra Maths practice that she were wanting.

You can get the workbook and answer book directly from CGP – Edexcel IGCSE Maths workbook and the Answer Book, I have spotted these at a number of bookstores (well I spotted the workbooks but not the answer books) and you can buy them from Amazon – CGP Edexcel International GCSE Maths Workbook and the CGP Edexcel IGCSE Maths Answer Book.

Admin – I approached CGP and asked if we could review some of their IGCSE resources, this Maths workbook was one of the resources that I was keen to review. I then bought the answer book myself.

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