Need help with Physics and Biology - urgent GCSE

I used the CGP study guides for all my sciences. (I did AQA in Biology, Physics and Chemistry.)
Starting from January before my GCSEs, I worked through each revision guide and wrote condensed revision note cards for each page, omitting any information I didn't need for my course (although most of it was useful and the specs at GCSE seem to be very similar). I learn by writing things out and phrasing information in my own words so I'm more likely to remember it. Also having a complete set of revision cards makes information easy to look up at a glance and I felt motivated to continue doing it so that I didn't have an incomplete set (my brain just works like that haha). My friends all found flash cards useful as well so they could recall steps of practicals and commonly asked questions that were likely to come up very easily.
I also recommend doing as many past paper exam questions as you can, especially on topics that you're not so confident with. Eventually, you'll get used to the style of question that can crop up and find it easier to answer them in the future. You can find past papers on the OCR website when you look for your qualification. Also just using Google and printing them from DocPlayer or something should be fine.
A useful tip for the exam is looking at the number of marks and thinking of the same number of key points or 'nuggets' of information that's relevant to the question.

Hope this helps! If you have any more questions I can try to advise you and answer them

You’re a star and thank you so much for all your help. I am in year 10 at the moment and I hope I have enough time to do a proper revision and writing up the flash cards. I never had a good physics or Biology teacher from year 7 to year 9. How do you remember the techniques for Bio. I think I have to start memorising them that the only way I can improve on Bio

Techniques for biology as in the practical techniques or exam techniques?

Both please

There will probably be at least two questions on practicals in the exam that you will see demonstrated throughout Year 10 and 11 so you'll learn these over time. Again, past papers will help you to be more prepared for when these 6-mark type questions come up as they will ask about practicals. Flashcards are best for this, bullet pointing the crucial steps of how to carry out the practical including what measurements you take, what you take them with and how you process the data. Drawing a neat labelled diagram of the practical apparatus on a flashcard will help too as you may need to draw it in an exam.

For exam technique, as for any subject exam, if you can't answer a question straight away, circle the question number and come back to it when you have time at the end. Once you've finished the paper, always check your answers by rereading the question, thinking about the answer again, follow through your answer and see if you've missed anything or misinterpreted the question and need to do it again.

Specifically for biology, they usually ask about food group tests, the heart (try to get to know the labelled diagrams of this very well) and other organ systems e.g. the circulatory system (where it goes, what's oxygenated and deoxygenated including types of blood vessel), the respiratory system (bronchioles and gas exchange is likely to come up) and the digestive system. The exam usually includes some photosynthesis, animal and plant cells and questions about exercise too (aerobic and anaerobic).

Personally, I was a visual learner when it came to biology and liked to put labelled diagrams on all of my revision notes. A good way to test if you can recreate those diagrams in an exam is printing off some blank labelled diagrams and trying to fill them in. To learn the functions of each organ/cell, I would put each component from a certain system into a table with the headings of 'name', 'description' and 'use'.

Homeostasis is quite a big topic so make sure you have good notes on that - diabetes and the thermoregulatory system come to mind for that I believe, they usually come up. Infection and response should be a reasonable topic to learn - make sure you're clear on which features of response are primary and which are secondary, the way I learned was drawing two separate diagrams of the body, one with only primary responses and one with only secondary (there are some tertiary that you might want to know about as well but I'm not sure about your spec).

Calculations in biology are relatively easy so if you're asked to interpret a graph or calculate a mean then hopefully you should have no problem with that and it should be easy marks. Make sure you don't miss a question with these kind of marks. I remember missing a 5 marker to do with a graph in my mocks because my brain skipped over it as it had no answer box by it and it was right at the bottom of the page...

Anything else you want advice on? Hope this is the answer you wanted!