Every year I try and write posts where I show which books we are planning on using for our home education and then at the end of the academic year I try and write a summary post on the resources that really worked well for us. Obviously what works well for me and my kiddos is not going to be the solution for everyone but I know that it is really useful to read these type of posts when you are trying to decide, hopefully someone will find it handy.

So these are the Year 7 (UK based) resources that worked well for my son and myself.

Maths. We have used the Mastering mathematics Book 1 this year and I loved it. I loved it because it just made Maths easy for me, I did not have to do lots of prep work or worry that we were covering everything, we just worked through all the chapters in the book and that way I knew we had done everything that we needed to do. The student book includes explanations, worked examples and then exercises (the exercises are split into 3 bands with the activities gradually getting harder). So really it is everything you need. We combined the Student book with the workbook. I have used this series with my daughter and I am now using it with my son. I really feel like it has taken a large amount of work off my shoulders (compared to when I used to search for all the Maths resources online). It is everything I need in a book and the explanations are spot on. For KS3 Maths I highly recommend this series.

Science. With Science we used a combination of two very different resources. Every week my son watched and participated in the Theatre of Science Home ed lessons. We love these sessions. They are really well done – informative and interesting at the same time. Lara always includes a worksheet which we download and print out before the lesson and then my son just logs on and works for the roughly 45 minutes. Brilliant and well worth the small monthly amount that we pay (the payment is optional but I think it is worth it as I really want her to continue creating these lessons).

We also reused our Activate 1 Science books. He had already done some of these sections when his sister used them so we really dipped in and out and covered the sections that he had either missed or we felt he needed to redo. The Activate 1 range includes a Student book (which is the explanation) and comes with 2 workbooks (which have answers at the back). We used the Student book together with the workbook, so he reads a section and then does the corresponding page in the workbook (you can choose from a foundation or higher workbook). I want to mention that we have looked at a few different KS3 science ranges and the Activate range is the one that I really like – it is well laid out, explanations are good and the workbooks includes practice questions. It really ticks all the boxes for us.

For English we used quite a few different resources over the past year but there are 3 that really stick out for me. The Get It Right Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation book and the Get It Right Boost Your Vocabulary book. Firstly both of these books come with answers. And as I needed my son to do more independent work this year having books with answers really became important. We also really liked the format. My son’s least favourite subject is English. He reads a lot and enjoys reading, but when it comes to doing English activities, well he would much rather sit down and do his Maths, Science or History than English. So I needed resources that were not too drawn out, that got to the point, had some activities, but not too many or he would get bored. And these two books just seemed to be at that level for him. The explanations were concise and the activities where enough to make him practice without being too long winded.

Then we also stuck with some of our Rollercoaster books. The Rollercoaster series are a set of books aimed at KS3 kids which are all brilliantly written (well we recommend all the ones that we have read so far) and they all come with lesson plans and few resources that you can choose to use if you want to. Really a helpful set of resources if you are a home educator.

History. I feel like I keep talking about our History books but I really do love the KS3 History books written by Aaron Wilkes and this one Invasion, Plague and Murder is brilliant for year 7. They are well written and interesting and they are brilliant at helping the kids to structure longer written questions. I really love this aspect about the books, they way they set out step-by-step how you should tackle written questions. Just brilliant. Also I want to stress content wise I feel like they hit the right balance. I have used other History books for this age range and I felt like those were too brief and the questions they included were too basic.

Now these are NOT all of the books that we used in my son’s Year 7. In fact we used a whole lot more but these are the ones that really worked well for both my son and myself. These are the books that I can confidently recommend.