One of the books that my daughter actually asked for was this one – her Biology Revision Guide from CGP. The reason why she wanted it was simple – she likes having a condensed, summarized book for Biology, something that she can read after she has gone through her main Biology text book.

Now I must confess I have often struggled with these CGP Revision Guides. I find some of the pages can be a bit overwhelming in that it sometimes feels like they have crammed a lot onto a page. However I must also admit that if you just concentrate on a block at a time they do manage to really condense the work and they are excellent summaries. For anyone with kiddos who struggle with how much is on a page they can always do my trick and block out the sections that they are not reading by just covering them up with a page.

Okay so it covers everything that you are going to need for your International GCSE Biology course (really everything is here).

It is summarized so the book is a lot thinner that the traditional text books. I personally think it needs to be used together with a textbook (student book) which has all the detail, but I have heard some people say that their kids used this as their main book. Now everyone works differently, but this really is a summary book, it does not have the detail that the other student books do have. And I do think you would miss out on understanding the concepts if you only used this book in isolation. But like I said that is our personal preference. We like being able to read about a concept in more detail, look at the summary in this book and then answer some questions. So for us that does mean we are using at a minimum 3 Biology books all together (1 student book, 1 summary book and at least 1 workbook).

I have said we like the way that they summarize the information into small blocks. It really does help to focus your attention onto the key parts.

But I also want to mention that we are massive fans of their labelled diagrams (really vital for Biology).

I am glad my daughter asked for this book because it is not one I would have normally thought of buying her. It really is a useful summary of all the key points and well worth the money I spent.