Studying the sciences as a home educating family

Here’s a post I’ve shared elsewhere describing our experience of studying the sciences and the resources we used. Hope it’s helpful!

My older two daughters sat all three sciences. We covered chemistry and physics together in one year and biology with another subject over one year again. We did a mixture of autumn/winter and summer sittings. Physics, astronomy and maths complement each other, so a combination of any two or all three would go well together.

Both my daughters achieved top grades without a DLP or tutor, just the textbook and online resources, YouTube etc and we found it quite straightforward. For context, although I enjoy science, I don’t have a science background and did combined science at school. It’s perfectly possible to support and facilitate your young person’s learning and learn alongside them, although there are some excellent providers too if you feel you might benefit from external support.

I have a whole load of YouTube playlists I put together I will share here and I’ll link to some of our favourites too.

Things to consider:

Have you decided on board?

There are some differences in the content and assessment. For various reasons, we took a combination of Edexcel (used for biology), and Cambridge, (physics and chemistry). Some of the channels/playlists listed below may focus on one or other, but, of course, there is overlap between the different specs and iGCSE and GCSE and the core content is the same across the board(!)

Here’s our chemistry

playlist.https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLihGn3rrqHso3u0YPxrwjcbjxTtQJyuc6 And:

Chemistry revision: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLihGn3rrqHsoxTA2LMe7I37fEuzk_vny6

Biology: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLihGn3rrqHsoexr_Ic0XSBUy4hwwv4q9c

And https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhwQ_-6xAMHugUT7lD13V-K3G3aGu6d56 Physics: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLihGn3rrqHspin1EICuXLbqWKVuk3n_2K Favourites:

Science with Hazel, (highly recommended!) Tom Dare, Ben Ryder (physics) and freesciencelessons, (for GCSE but good for all core content) on YouTube. Also, physics and maths tutor, (which, despite the name, covers much more than physics and maths and has full revision notes by topic) https://www.physicsandmathstutor.com/physics-revision/

Also recommended The Conscientious Biologist on You Tube. He has produced an excellent set of videos covering GCSE Biology.

More resources recommended by members of this group:

For physics, here’s our resource list: SouthWest Science School online course.

Theatre of Science You Tube

Physics with Keith You Tube

Cerazzle YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ceerazzledazzlephysics/playlists

Flashy Science – online experiments BBC Bitesize https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLidqqIGKox7UVC-8WC9djoeBzwxPeXph7 Cognito

Practicals: