My son is technically still in Year 9 but we have already finished his KS3 Science and his KS3 History so I have decided that we will start some of his IGCSE subjects early (Please do not get me wrong I am not rushing him, he has flown through his existing work and he is actually quite ready to start a bit early). We are starting his IGCSE Biology and his IGCSE Physics. But before I really jumped into his IGCSE Physics course with him I wanted to do a quick recap and check his KS3 Physics so I got him the CGP Key Stage Three 10-Minute Physics Test book.
We have used a few of these books over the years and I actually quite like them. They are quick tests which cover everything that the kids should have learnt. So I look at them as a quick way to see if the basics have been understood. These are not exam practice questions (for me that comes later), this is about making sure the kids have understood the basic facts, because you can’t work on longer style exam questions if the basics are not there.
Okay so every test is quick and spread over a double page.
The questions do vary but they are quick questions (no long wordy questions), the book says each test is 10 minutes but honestly my kids often do them in 5 minutes.
This book includes tests on – Energy and Matter, Forces and Motion, Waves, Electricity and Magnetism, The Earth and Beyond and Mixed Questions. Also I want to stress there are answers for all the questions are at the back of the book. I love books which include the answers because at this age my kids can mark their own work and see where they went wrong.
I think this little book is very useful and well priced. In fact I have also bought the IGCSE equivalent of this book to use with my kids.
Admin – This is NOT sponsored, I bought the book for my kids to use and I am writing about the book because I think it is a useful resource. 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.
For a number of years I have heard the story about the elephants in South Africa who go and visit a widow every year on her husband’s death anniversary. It is a story that is both sweet and incredible, how do these elephants know it the death anniversary and what made them so loyal to this man that every year they go and mourn his death. So when I heard that he had written a book (before his death) about these elephants and his journey with them I immediately knew that my son and I needed to read it. Luckily our local library had a copy and we managed to get out hands on the gem that is The Elephant Whisperer.
My son read it first and every day he would come down to tell me the latest adventures and we would chuckle and marvel at the goings on of all the animals at this game reserve. (He did get great satisfaction telling me about the black mamba that was chilling in their house for a few days – because honestly he knew that I would have died if I found out I had been living with a black mamba in my house.) To say this book gripped my thirteen-year old and to say that he loved every bit of it is an understatement. Everyone who could possible listen was told story after story. He loved both the stories about the African wildlife and the ones about the dogs who lived with the couple on this reserve. He found the stories about the tribes in the area fascinating and even quizzed me if some of the goings on could actually be true (I think he found a little bit of it was just too much to believe – but as I grew up in Kwa-Zulu Natal I reassured him that no, this all sounded very reasonable for that part of the world).
Once he had finished it I immediately started and I LOVED every page and every word. Okay possibly I am biased as it did remind me of home but honestly what a man, what a family, what an adventure and what incredibly luckily elephants they were to have found their way to this home. But really who can not be moved by a story that involves elephants who were badly treated but then find a home where they are understood and respected and in turn they help out another orphaned elephant, they protect the man who saved them and they even help some buck escape by opening the gate of the boma.
The story of his journey with this herd of elephants is incredible and it restores your faith in human nature.
I don’t want to give away the stories and adventures that are in this book because I really believe it should be on every kids and every adults must read book list. It is about how humans can help, how humans can learn from animals and how if we treat an animal with love and respect you just might get it back. Give this book a try, you really will be transported back to a game reserve in South Africa and you will not be disappointed.
We RECOMMEND this book. In fact if there is one book that you need to read within the next year then this is that book.
Admin – 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.
This is quite a big one and there are lots of ways of figuring this out but I am going to try and explain what WE thought about when we came to selecting the exam boards for our IGCSE subjects.
First things first. When your kid is writing their GCSE / IGCSE subjects as an external candidate you can basically choose which ever subjects you want and which ever exam board you want. You can choose to write subjects from different exam boards. You can choose to stagger the subjects and not write them all at once (we did this). This is a lot more choice but because there is a lot more choice it can also become more confusing and challenging as you never know which is the best option. And you probably worry a lot more, because you wonder if you have made the correct choices or not.
So let me say this please remember as an external candidate if something has gone wrong your kid can always choose to reset the exam at another time.
Okay so GCSE vs IGCSE as external candidates. Most external candidates choose to write IGCSE exams for the simple reason that they are more geared to external students whereas GCSE content is more geared towards school students (e.g. English exams may including speaking or being able to just do an English exam as a written exam). If kids started their GCSE subjects in a school and then part way through choose to home educate then they often stick (not always) with what they were already doing at school.
Okay one of the first things you need to consider is – are there exam centers near you and if so what exam boards and subjects do they offer (you can also find out if the local schools allow external candidates we ignored the schools option as I have heard some bad stories about this option). You might be like me and not really care about the distance that you need to travel. I just went with the thinking that if we need to get in our car and drive for an hour to get to an exam center that allows us to write the subjects we want with the exam board we want then I will do that. But for some people who live more remotely this can become a big issue. So think of possible exam center venues and find out which exam boards they cater for (and which subjects for those exam boards).
Some people use multiple exam centers. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to find one exam center that my daughter could write all her exams at, even if it meant traveling a bit. So I found an exam center that offered all the subjects we wanted, with both of our potential exam boards and even offers IGCSE and A Level subjects. I did this because I knew she would feel more settled if we stuck to one venue and at this point I feel like that has worked, she knows the venue, she knows their routine and she even knows a few of the staff. This was a personal preference that suited my kid, and honestly by selected just one center it took some pressure off me but I want to stress there is no rule that you need to write all your exams at the same center.
Based on my own reading and understanding I knew we would go the IGCSE route for everything (honestly doing GCSE subjects as an external candidate just sounding like more of a headache). And that we would write either Edexcel International GCSE subjects or Cambridge IGCSE subjects (there is a difference between the subjects offered by these 2 exam boards). Okay so I narrowed it down to 2 exam boards for ALL the subjects and ONLY IGCSE. If you get to this stage you have already made progress.
Then my kids selected their subjects and we went subject by subject and thought of the exam board (some subjects are only offered by one Exam board e.g. in the beginning my daughter wanted to do Ancient History which would automatically have been with Cambridge IGCSE). For the subjects that could be with either exam board I looked at the subject specification (specs) from each exam board (you can download this from the exam board websites). For some subjects it was an easy decision – for History we selected Edexcel because they offered the history topics that she wanted to study, that was an easy one. For some subjects it is not that different – Biology I really thought we could have gone with either exam board, we went with Edexcel for this subject really because of the study materials that I found.
If after looking at the specs you are not sure I would suggest downloading a past paper from each exam board and compare the questions (I did this for English Language). If you have a look at the style of questions and how they differ between the exam boards you might get a better idea of which one will suit your kid better. (For past papers look on the exam boards website they have them under each subject).
If after looking at the subjects specs and past papers and you still have no idea then I suggest looking at resources available. Can you find more resources and support for one of the exam boards? Finding resources to use is going to be important, I found with my daughter’s History, one of the topics that she choose to study did not have as many supporting resources so I ended up making quite a bit for her. Learning resources are important.
I am not sure if this helps at all but this was how I thought about it – which exam boards do the exam centers use, look at the subject specs, compare past papers and check to make sure you can find resources to use.
I have to admit that we are not using Twinkl as much for KS3 resources as we did for Primary resources (largely because we are using more student books) but I do still sometimes turn to it when I need something extra. (If you are wondering so far my most used KS3 resources from Twinkl have been their KS3 Maths pages, English literature units and some English Language activities).
But recently my son dropped a bit of an unexpected bomb (it really did feel like a bomb went off in my head) – he announced that he was going to do Geography as one of his IGCSE subjects. So a bit of context – about a year ago he was convinced he would not do Geography (much to my joy) so we have kind of neglected the Geography a bit (he is now Year 9). But logically speaking for the career paths that he is considering Geography does actually make sense and although he loves History he is not as much of a writer as his sister is and History IGCSE is heavy on writing longer questions. Anyway the shock announcement meant I now needed to start thinking of which exam board we would use for Geography (I don’t stick to one exam board) and which resources and boy oh boy did I mention the oldest just wrote her finals for IGCSE English Language, has 3 weeks before her History IGCSE finals and I am every so slightly stressed…………… So to help myself calm down and buy myself some time to form a Geography plan of attack (and I do not use the word attack here lightly) I had a quick look on the Twinkl website to see if I could download some general Geography resources. The ideas was to get us slowly back into doing Geography on a regular basis and hopefully help start adding to our Geography knowledge bank (I must admit the more that I thought about it the more I realized that he actually has quite a good basis just from all the reading that he does on biomes/ habitats/ conservation etc so the panic has started to ease up a bit – just a bit)
Anyway I had a quick look on Twinkl and stumbled onto their KS3/GCSE Geography Comprehension Bundle which I thought looked interesting and importantly it would buy me some time to do my research while also providing him with some Geography.
Oh – just to mention the printouts are in colour but my printer has been working overtime with my daughters IGCSE subjects and is now refusing to print in colour (really did I mention that I was stressed and now my printer is doing strange things).
So what exactly is included in this bundle (this is directly off their website)
Each one includes a fact sheet (the length varies from 1 page to 5 pages – well of the 4 that we have completed so far) and then there is a question sheet (normally 1 or 2 pages) and an answer sheet.
So far it is proving to be a very useful bundle and yes I am getting myself organized with Geography and I am drinking lots of coffee to help maintain a bit of sanity.
Admin – This post is not in any way linked to Twinkl, and is NOT a paid for post, this is just me sharing about a useful resource that I found
When we were preparing for the IGCSE English Language exam I went onto YouTube and found a few different people who shared videos on how they suggested you answer the exam questions. I showed a few of them to my daughter and she very quickly zoomed in on one – Taughtly. Out of all the different English Language videos that both she and I watched Taughtly was the one that we went to time and time again, in fact I think we ended up watching every single one of her IGCSE English Language Videos and in the end we just used Taughtly’s videos and ignore the others.
We started by watching Taughtly on YouTube, I think the first time we turned to her was for her video on how to tackle the descriptive writing question for paper 2. I am so glad we found her because my daughter is actually a really good writer but she needed to understand what the examiners were after. And she needed those vital pointers on how to structure her piece so that she could complete it within he time frame.
We then discovered her website (Taughtly website) where she shares worksheets and other bits and pieces and I even signed up for a FREE account with her which allowed us to download extra pages and access whatever we wanted. (She does also have some English Literature content but we have not used any of that we have just been using her English Language content).
So what is it about her videos that we liked?
Well firstly she speaks clearly and is easy to understand (sounds basic but I have found a few where we were struggling to understand them). But the main thing is the way she tackles the work – she breaks the questions down into stages and explains them clearly. She provides worksheets so they kids can work through activities / questions with her guidance. AAnd I feel like her advice and suggestions are both practical and doable.
If you are going to be working towards the Cambridge IGCSE English Language exam then both my daughter and I highly recommend you spend some time watching the Taughtly videos. She really was the resource that gave us a LOT of confidence before the exams (we have not got her marks for her final exam back yet but she did incredibly well in her mocks and I do feel like a lot of that was because of Taughtly’s content)
Okay for those of you wondering we decided to go for the Cambridge IGCSE English Language exam and NOT the Edexcel IGCSE English Language exam mainly because of the style of questions, we preferred the way the Cambridge exam papers were set out and their type of questions to the Edexcel exam paper.
Admin – We have No connection of Link to this content provider. We were just really impressed with her resources which I why I am mentioning her and sharing links for the resources.
ofamily learning together 