Good books for science GCSE

 I am often asked which books I recommend for GCSE Science. These books are very visual but have a large amount of content. These books are written for all syllabuses ( AQA, Edexcel and OCR) and thus cover all the different GCSE's in three books. These books are for Single, double and triple science. They also cover most of the material for the 21st Century syllabus as well.
Each Chapter is well laid out with images and a good deal of well displayed facts. There is also a substantial amount of text as an explanation. This is much better than some of the normal students books which do not give enough material. These books provide some background material which is otherwise

missing from their school books.
At the end of each chapter there is a summary with some missing word to complete and some questions. At the end of each topic there are some past  paper questions and others from all boards.
These represent good books at a good price to cover all the different boards syllabus.
Each book has plenty of images both pictures and graphics to show or explain each different situation.
Hemel Private Tuition

Private Tutoring Boosts grades

If you want to improve your grades then a Private Tutor seems a good idea. An hour with a private tutor and your grades shoot up from a U to and A*.

Unfortunately this is not the case.

The tutor may know the yllabus and the work and may be able to explain it differently to you than your teacher did, which will help you to understand what you didn't learn in class.. The tutor has only you and you to full concentration. Your grade might go up a bit, but to go up more then you need to do some work as well.

You now have a better understanding of the subject but now you need to learn this work.

How do you learn this stuff.

1. Make notes of what the tutor says. The tutor may make notes but you also need some.
2. Read through these notes a few times.
3. Read the notes again another day.
4. Do some practice questions.
5. Get these questions marked with someone telling you waht you did wrong.
6. On another day do these questions again just after you have re-read your notes.
7. Try some more questions.

With a Private Tutor for a few weeks and doing all of the above, you grades will soar.

The Learning still has to be done, but guided learning makes things easier.

EM Spectra

What is Light? How are the other EM Spectra different?

They are not is the simple answer. From Gamma rays to radio waves the EM spectra is just the same, its only that we perceive them differently and need different ways of detecting the waves.

Lets look at an example.
We see light in all its different colours. Each different colour is a different wavelength. Lets look at Infra red. if I shine an infra red beam at you, you don't see it simply because your eyes don't detect infrared radiation. If I direct a camera (that has a wider capture range than your eye) at an infrared beam then I can "see" it - simply because the camera detects the light and changes its wavelength into something you can see.
You Tube video of a looking a Sky remote

So know you can see IR light then UV is the same. Moving further along the spectrum then we need different types of detectors to detect the radiation. Our hands work well as detectors on the lower end of the infrared and for more frequencies we need more and different detectors.

The detectors change but the nature of the waves does not change.

How to Learn Multiplication Tables

If you ask most students what is is their real problem with Maths, they usually own up to not knowing their times tables. It doesn't really matter the students age or level (Some A level students don't know their tables.)

Now is the best time to learn those tables.

How do I learn the multiplication tables.
There are some wonderful mobile apps that help, but there is really no other choice than learning all the tables from scratch.

Learn your tables in a week.

Stage 1
Chose 1 table to learn
Write out the table

1 x 4 = 4
2 x 4 = 8
3 x 4 = 12

and so on...

Stage 2
Write this table out 5 times
This is getting boring - can you write out the table without looking

Stage 3
Write out the table without looking (and without counting on)

Sucess then Stage 4 otherwise repeat Stage 2

Stage 4
Now here you need someone to help
Get them to ask each of the lines at random
They say for example 4 x 5 =
And you say 20 withing 2 seconds

Stage 5
If you have learnt anther table then have a mixture of those you have learnt.
Continue until you know them all.

Stage 6
Revise daily for a few weeks.

Revising for Maths

Many subjects can be revised by learning the facts as outlined in the previous post.

Maths revision is different.

It doesn't work that way. For A level and GCSE there are certainly some formulae that have to be learnt because they are not on the formula sheet, but for most maths there is only one way.

Do some examples.

Here is a simple plan to Help.

For this you need a Maths book and not necessarily the one you use at school.

Stage 1
Choose a Topic

Stage 2
Read through the example questions and samples. If you can't remember them then do the examples on a sheet of paper. Looking at how it is done.

Stage 3
Do an example - write down the question, close the book and then answer the question

Stage 4
Do all the odd number question in an exercise

Stage 5
Now you understand how to do the questions
And this is the important bit
Each day do one or two of the even numbered questions from the exercise each day.
Now you know how to do the sum, doing one or two each day keeps them fresh in your mind.

Stage 6
Repeat Stage 1-5
Each day you learn ( ok revise) a new topic and each day you practice one or two questions from each of the other topics you have revised.

How to start Revising

How to start Revising.

Revising is not first time learning, although for many it is.

Stage 1
So stage one is to read through your course book. Most students don't have any notes, or notes good enough to revise from. Choose a topic and read through the section you have decided to learn.

Stage 2
Now re-read the section. What are the important things?

Stage 3
Write these down as a series of bullet points. This is your notes to revise.

Stage 4
Look at each of these bullet points in turn. For each do this.
Read the bullet point then read the text in the book about this.

Stage 5
Close the book
Read the bullet point and write down everything you can remember ( writing the stuff down helps it go into memory so don't skip this. It doesn't have to be much.

Stage 6
Check what you wrote and compare it with the book

Stage 7
Repeat 4 5 and 6

Stage 8
Go and find someone
Get them to test you.
It works.