What are some IB essentials

[studying-ib-inturkey]

Hi Guys 

Right now i am about to graduate from 10th grade. Next year I am an IB student.I am taking 

HL PHYSICS

HL MATH

HL ENGLISH

SL CHEM

(these 4 are the ones that i need information)

I can't find enough resource about what i might need so i wanted to ask you what are your  essentials .

And I don't know what kind of folder or binder organization i should have. Also i heard that they assign homework for summer .Did you guys had homework?

[Alex Jordan]

For your sciences, you'll need a HUGE binder. I'd organise everything by topic - have a lot of tabs for HL Physics, because you'll have more topics to study than SL. You'll still need a good amount of tabs for Chem, but not as much. Take good notes too - what I did was I'd try to get everything down during lectures (albeit in very messy handwriting), then as soon as I got home I'd copy them down in a nice, clean format in colour so that I could study from them easier.

 

For English, do your readings!! I had a 2" binder. You'll want to engage yourself in the readings. Make charts on themes, characters and their relations, symbols, and compare/contrast your readings as well. Venn diagrams were nice for me.

 

For HL Math, I'd do a two-fold organisation system: first, organise by topic, then organise by the syllabus requirements. So, for my SL syllabus, we had Topic 1: Algebra. Then inside we'd have 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, so on...I'd copy down notes and homework and IB Released items and put them in the binder so when it came time for studying for my external assessment, I could easily go by topic and then narrow down what I needed to focus on the most.

 

Depending on your school, you may have summer homework. I had summer readings for HL English, and it was recommended to carry out science IAs (this was going from IB1 to IB2). You may have readings for IB English - do those in increments over the summer, and take good notes on thhe book - annotate like crazy.

 

I hope this helps.

[ShootingStar16]

HL math: I heard it was really hard and you have to really like math if you're taking it.

 

HL english: depends on if you're in Lit or LangLit. For Lit, I suggest taking notes on books you read, so you can keep track of key themes and motifs and characterization. You should probably get a notebook for the note taking. 

 

SL chem: hardest IB subject out of all my IB classes imo :/ they expect so much for written response and the labs have to be really detailed (you do a whole bunch of error propagation), but the calculations are easy. It's just those conceptual written response questions. You probably don't need notebooks for this class. Idk it depends but for us, we get 50 page note packages for each unit  

 

For binder and folder organization, it really depends on who you are. Some people can fit stuff into 1 inch binders, some people need 2 inch binders and some people just use folders. For me, I have two inch binders and usually, for each binder I keep 2 subjects in at most that are most similar to each other (e.g. I put English and History into one binder and Chem and bio in another). Always have a stash of loose leaf paper with you because you never know when you need it. 

 

At my school, we don't get homework over the summer except that we have the option of doing our math/sciences IA's and EE over the summer (it's not mandatory, but recommended). 

[Schrodinger's CAS]

For English, when you read the books, create a note page for each character, theme, motif, and symbol. As you go through the books, jot down any relevant information that you find about those literary techniques. After you've finished all the books, go back to your notes and see if you can find any links/similarities between them. A Venn diagrams would help.