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I had a nice surprise today; on my way to my classroom after lunch, our receptionist waved me over and hefted a heavy cardboard parcel into my hands. I had no idea what it was, so it was quite exciting to unwrap this free sample copy of the Cambridge Mathematics GCSE textbook that I'd completely forgotten I ordered at the Maths Conference in March.
I've just had a little peruse through, and as it's the first new GCSE book I've got my mitts on, I thought I'd write a quick post about first impressions for anyone who may be shopping for new textbooks for next year. The outside's quite attractive, but it is a very hefty book - although it says "Student Book" on the front, I doubt there would be any scope for pupils carting this to and from school, and carrying a class set around school would certainly strengthen those biceps - kinda reemphasises just how much content will be in the new GCSEs. |
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There's also a "Launchpad" section for each chapter, which functions as a pre-assessment, enabling pupils to skip out sections of the chapter if they are already confident with the content. I really like both of these features!
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Each chapter starts with a real-life application, which is fantastic, and a "Before You Start" section to check prior knowledge from KS3. I think this is going to be as useful for teachers as for pupils as we're all getting used to the new wording and expectations, particularly for those pupils doing the new Higher GCSE.
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The exercises are pretty standard; fine for basic practice with some wordier problems.
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The "Problem Solving Framework" is quite useful for giving pupils a step-by-step approach to tackle the problems in the following exercise.
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Some of the real-life examples are really good, but I think there's a lot more scope for developing these further; some are presented as examples and then not used, which makes me think that they may be overlooked.
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The worked examples are done in a decent bit of detail, but I'm quite disappointed at the lack of pictoral representations for fractions!
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The new content is all there, but some of it seems a little sparse and would probably need to be supplemented. This picture is of the page on "Exact Trigonometric Ratios", and there's very little here that a competent A Level teacher couldn't come up with off the top of their head.
I would imagine that later editions might end up bulked out or changed once we've been through a few exam cycles and we see what these new topics look like on real exam papers. Following a fifteen-minute flick through, this is a decent quality textbook. As a department, we're not ordering a whole new set of books, as we had new ones a couple of years ago and they ain't cheap! We've also stopped using them as much since changing our curriculum at KS3. However, if you were looking to replace a very old set of GCSE books, you could do a lot worse than this. The book also mentions links to the Cambridge Mathematics Online site, which I imagine may offer some supplementary resources, but I can't offer any opinions on that as I can't access it! |
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