Finally, my oldest has written her last IGCSE exam, which was Physics and we are all starting to relax a bit. I am not going to lie but the last 2 subjects (Maths and Physics) have been our most stressful. But it got me thinking that there must be other home educating parents out there who are feeling a bit stressed about Physics so I thought I would put together a quick summary of the Physics resources that worked for us. All of these are the resources that my oldest used for her preparations for her exams and all of these are the exact same resources that my youngest is current also using (he was already started with his IGCSE Physics and Biology).

To start with we did Physics a bit differently to our other subjects and that is because we discovered the lovely Lara from Theatre of Science. We did every one of her IGCSE lessons and we also did the homework activities that she set us. Honestly she is brilliant and I must be completely honest and say discovering her lessons took a huge weight off my shoulders. Both my kids love her lessons. And I will mention she does live lessons and she also has recorded lessons so you can pick which one works for your kiddo (I have 1 kid you LOVES the lives lesson and 1 kid who would rather watch her recorded lessons).

To go along with her lessons we used 3 books. Our Collins Edexcel IGCSE Student book, which gives some good explanations. Our CGP Edexcel IGCSE Revision Guide (more summarized) and our CGP Edexcel IGCSE Workbook, which we used for extra questions, we did these questions as we covered the work in Lara’s lessons.

All three books were well used but if I had to only pick 2 I would stick with the Revision Guide and the Workbook (One of the things that I really liked about these 2 books is the fact that they are very clear about what content is only included in Paper 2 – I found this invaluable).

While we were working through the Theatre of Science lessons we did also use Cognito. Now I chose to stick with the free version of Cognito and we did not do every single lesson on Cognito, I would say we did about 70% of the lessons. I did find it was useful and my daughter enjoyed working through the videos and answering the questions (My daughter likes the Cognito format of quick explanation videos followed by a few questions to test that she has understood – she used Cognito for Biology, Physics and Maths).

Okay so those were the resources that we used while we were covering the content.

When it came time to revise we did include a few other sources. For revision we did sometimes go back and rewatch some of the Theatre of Science content but we also did watch content from Science with Hazel. I feel like Theatre of Science is more detailed explanation and Science with Hazel is more summarized, so the one if good for when you are covering the content for the first time and the other is more suitable for revision.

We also used our Edexcel IGCSE Phsyics 10-minute test book and our CGP Edexcel IGCSE Physics cards.

I liked having both resources but I know sometimes you have to choose and if I had to choose one I would choose the Question and Answer cards. These cards together with our CGP Edexcel IGCSE Revision Guide were the main source of revision notes/ questions that my daughter used over and over. I honestly would not want to revise without these two resources.

And finally when it came to practice questions I did two things. I went onto the Edexecl site and downloading lots of their past papers and marks schemes (which is a must). You want to make sure your kiddo works through quite a few past papers (full papers and timed).

But I also found the Physics and Maths Tutor site was brilliant. What I liked about the Physics and Maths Tutor site is they group the questions into topics. So as you kiddo revises Forces you can print out a pack of forces question for them to work through, and yes the questions are exam style questions and yes all answers are included.

That is everything that we used and how we used it. I hope this gives someone else some ideas about potential resources. But honestly it is not as scary as you may imagine at first, just dive in and go for it.

For those of you who want them here are Amazon links for all the books I mentioned

• Collins Edexcel IGCSE Physics Student book
• CGP Edexcel IGCSE Physics Revision Guide
• CGP Edexcel IGCSE Physics Workbook
• CGP Edexcel IGCSE Physics 10 minute test book
• CGP Edexcel IGCSE Physics question and answer cards

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