My son is only in his year 8 but we have already completed a lot of his secondary work and he really finds environmental topics interesting, so I decided that we would start him on the Environmental Management IGCSE subject. (Yes I do know it is early, and I am not normally one for rushing things but I also believe that you do what suits the individual kid, and he has the ability and the interest so we are adding it).

To start with I needed to find a text book / student book – I wanted something that included everything, I just find it easier when we have one main book to work from. So I went with the Collins Student Book – Cambridge IGCSE Environmental Management by David Weatherly and Nicholas Sheehan.

Okay so what is included in this book? If you compare the book to the subject specification it includes everything that the kids need to cover for this subject.

• Rocks and minerals and their exploitation
• Energy and the environment
• Agriculture and the environment
• Water and its management
• Oceans and fisheries
• Managing natural hazards
• The atmosphere and human activities
• Human population
• Natural ecosystems and human activities
• End of Topic Questions

We have just started with the first chapter but first impressions are that I like the format and layout. The pages are broken down into chunks of information, with lots of photographs and diagrams (we love visual aids). They also often use bullet points and tables to help organize facts (also really like this).

Case studies are included (these are essential) and at the end of each chapter there is a good summarized checklist (very useful).

Questions for all the chapters are at the end of the book.

Advantages of the book – it covers everything that you need in one book. I like the page layout and I don’t find it too much in one go. It is an easy to use, easy to read book. I like the end of the chapter checklists and I like all the case studies. Really it is everything you need. The book is also written in a way that you don’t need to do the chapters in order, if you want you can jump around, you can. I like this because we can then link it to our other Science topics that we are working on or have just completed (eg we recently did some work on Rocks so we are starting with that and will possibly then jump to chapter 6 which is Earthquakes and volcanoes etc and then chapter 9 which is the Ecosystems).

If I had to think about the disadvantages of this book there are possibly two – I am not sure if they have included enough questions for my liking, but then again I am the kind of educator who likes lots of practice questions and I do mean a LOT and secondly the answers for the questions are in the Teacher’s Guide.

Okay so are we only using this book? No. I am all for adding YouTube videos to our learning and I have already found a bunch which deal with Environmental Management. So we are without a doubt going to be watching those. Am I going to be adding in extra activities / worksheets? At this stage I honestly do not know. We are starting with our Rock topic and then just going to see how we progress. But for now I am happy with this as our starting point and I will update as we progress.

Admin – Once I decided to do Environmental Management I contacted Collins and asked if they could send us this book for a review. This is NOT a paid for post.

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