@Rosalindphys Textbooks: remixed

It’s hard to overstate the impact that Ruth Walker (@Rosalindphys) has had on my teaching.

In July 2017 I was lucky enough to see Ruth present at researchED Rugby on the topic of textbooks. As has become routine at Ruth’s presentations, I was blown away. Her argument for well sequenced textbooks with Shed Loads Of Practice (SLOP) built in was utterly compelling. She’d already made textbooks for the GCSE Combined Science Physics content (a gargantuan task). I was a consultant at the time and made a point of telling literally every KS4 Science teacher I encountered about them, demonstrating their brilliance.

I returned full time to the classroom in September 2018 (2 years out) and Ruth’s textbooks were an absolute lifesaver.

Ruth has revamped them over the summer holidays and they’re better than ever. I want anyone teaching KS4 Physics in my school to make use of them this year, so I’ve remixed them (not improved them, just tailored them to my specific needs) a little bit to suit our own curriculum. I’ve added worked/partial example pairs for the calculations, rejigged the formatting a bit to reduce printing costs, and added a few extra bits in (for example, we’re reteaching conduction and convection at KS4).

Remixes

In case they’re any use to anyone else, you can find the remixes here:

Energy: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dT2dAcOHoczZujfo07XlfeqnhortZeOR

Electricity: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nAOBapyh-gqvdpe8f98WpHzdknGjrH_V

Forces (motion): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Px6F9on7FPie46MT1-SXBAD1Dwd1p_Z9

Forces (Newton’s Laws): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZrENWFIROr-lf5wKAaC72k07fFfF3RnD

I’ll add the others as I get around to tweaking them.

Ruth’s originals and essential reading

Ruth’s originals are here: https://rosalindwalker.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/new-physics-slop-booklets/

If you’re new to the booklet approach (despite some saying that they’ve ALWAYS done this, there’s a whole generation of us for whom well structured textbooks with lots of practice questions are a relatively new thing) then it’s well worth reading her supporting links about how and why to use booklets.

It’s also worth reading this excellent post by James Theobald (@JamesTheo): https://othmarstrombone.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/all-the-gear-but-no-idea-the-aggrandisement-of-the-resource-in-teaching/

Booklets are brilliant but you still need to know your stuff!