I have written a few posts about the books that we used for our different Internal GCSE History topics but I have not yet written about this brilliant revision note book that we bought. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE History My Revision Notes – I Loved it.

Okay so this is one book and anyone doing Edexcel International GCSE History will know you are given a number of different topics and you only need to choose 4 of those topics. So there is never going to be one book that will ever be able to provide you with decent notes on all of these topics. However that being said this book does include 3 of the Depth Study options, 2 of the Historical Investigation options and 2 of the Breadth Study options. So whether it is going to useful to your kiddo will depend on which topics your kiddo has chosen to study. As it happens 3 of the 4 topics that my kiddo choose where included in this book so for us this was a good buy.

But just to make it clear the topics covered in this book are:

• Germany: development of a dictatorship (Depth Study)
• A world divided: superpower relations (Depth Study)
• A divided union:civil rights in the USA (Depth Study)
• Russia and the Soviet Union (Historical Investigations)
• The USA (Historical Investigations)
• Changes in medicine (Breadth Studies)
• China: conflict, crisis and change (Breadth Studies)

The book starts with a few pages called “Guide to the Pearson Edexcel International History Examination” – this is where they talk about each paper and the type of questions you will get, they also include tips of how to answer the questions. However there are NO sample answers. Through the chapters there are also exam practice questions with exam tips but again NO sample answers. Now for me although this was useful it was not the reason why we bought this book. We already knew what questions to expect and we already understood the way to answer the questions (in fact I found her other books and which gave sample answers more useful in this area).

The reason why we bought this book was because they have summarized the key facts and presented them in a VERY useful and VERY clevar manner. This for us is just what it says – It is REVISION NOTES. These are NOT meant to be detailed notes with lots of background information. This is a book which sets out the key facts. And I want to state very clearly they have set out ALL the key facts in a very easy to read and easy to understand format. Honestly these are brilliant summary notes. I also want to state they are NO pictures or photographs in this book, think bullet points and blocks of information. Someone said they found it boring because there were no pictures, but personally I did not expect them to include pictures in revision notes. I expected short to the point concise statements about key facts and that it what this book delivers.

Do I think you could ONLY use this resource and no other resources for your History Topics and still get an 8 or 9 – NO. Although I think these notes are excellent and I consider them good value for money I do NOT think you can only use one book/ one source for your topics and expect to get the top marks. If you are after the top marks then I think you need to read more than one book and you need to spend some time on the internet watching clips that talk about these topics so that you full understand the events of that time.

When we did each of our topics we used more detailed books and did lots of practice questions as we worked through the topic. This book is really your summary, your key points, a reminder of key events and what happened. It is a resource to be used once you have covered your topic. It is excellent as that but I don’t think you could use this as your one and only resource for all your topics.

I do highly recommend this book as an excellent set of Revision (summary) notes.

For those of you interested here is the Amazon link for this book – Pearson Edexcel International GCSE History My Revision Notes

Admin – This is NOT a sponsored post. I bought this book for my daughter with her revision. I have written this post because I recommend the book. 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 recommend.