Crazy 11 plus summer learning ebook bundle deal at last!

Good morning, 11+ families! Here we are, already at the end of the first week of the holidays. How is your journey? I hope you and your child have managed to find the 10-15 hrs to devote exclusively to 11 plus learning, and that progress is being made. To anyone who has downloaded and is using the happyhacks English 11 plus range of ebooks, I truly hope you can see shape and fluency developing in your child’s writing. I also hope the multiple choice hacks are hot-wiring your child’s recognition of the traps all tests play, while giving them helpful strategies and tricks to beat the tests at their own game and score high.

The purpose of this post is really to let you know I have at last managed to put together a better than half price bundle deal for all 4 required books in the series. I’m sorry it’s taken so long; 11plushappy! is not a big company, it’s just me – a teacher who can’t stop teaching, even in the holidays! If you have been browsing the books and are wondering if they can help, I really hope you’ll dive in now. They are stuffed with hours of learning; hundreds of tricks, strategies and writing must-haves to help your child superboost their learning and be amongst the best prepared on the day.

With the bundle deal, all 4 books are now yours for immediate download for less than half the price of buying them individually, and less than one hour of tuition!

Why has it taken me so long? Simply, I’m learning to create a digital life in between teaching and tuition. I’m a teacher and writer, not a marketer, but I’m learning that when you have something you know can help children and parents, you also have to learn to shout about it, so children and parents can actually get the help. WordPress, who host this little site you’re reading now, have patiently, finally, guided me to completion.

All the learning can now be yours.

So, a plea. If you are now ready to put the effort in and really make a difference to your child’s 11 plus chances (which you are), especially in this 6-week gift of time we call the summer holidays, please visit the store and choose the crazy summer learning bundle deal. You are free to download and print any part of any book, however you choose to help your child. If you’d like to browse through what’s in each book, you can read the ‘Look inside’ section of each book on amazon, where you can also pick up the books if you prefer to read on a kindle.

Thank you for letting me tell you about books to help your child. Time is short, there is much to do. I know they can help. Our son, now 18, is awaiting A level results that will allow him to take up his offer of a place at Oxford. Whatever happens, for us as parents, my wife and I, as well as our son, know that offer may never have happened without his incredible grammar school education showing him the way.

Discover for yourself the difference the happy hacks can make to your child’s 11 plus learning, and wherever today’s learning is taking place – in a cafe, on a beach, at the kitchen table, on a train – I hope you and your child have an incredible, fun day of happy learning together.

Stay 11plushappy!

Lee

I just remembered – the 11plus is fun!

The best of mornings to 11 plus children and parents everywhere. A very quick post, before my student arrives, to share a lesson from a lesson. Yesterday, a student was experiencing and working through her first cloze exercise. I was in full serious teacher mode (spoiler: not the best mode!) as we explored how to examine the words outside the gap as much as the words given to fill in the gap. Three plus one brief tips to rehearse with your child, though this is not the point of this post, as you’ll see in a moment:

If it’s a passage or paragraph containing several blank spaces to fill in, read the whole piece first, or at least the first few sentences. This allows your brain to work out what kinds of words would suit the blank (verbs, adjectives, etc.) as well as helping you understand the meaning, mood and tense of the whole piece. Avoid rushing into answer the first question.
Make sure the word you choose fits both parts of the sentence – the part before the gap AND the part after the gap. Many words fit one half of the sentence, which could be enough to trick you into choosing a wrong word.
The search for small words is a big thing. Look at small words before and after the gap, as well as any small words that are part of the answer options. For example, if there is “a” before the gap, then the word you are looking for will at least start with a consonant, whereas if “an” appears, the next word must be a vowel. Small words can also help you match tense and quantity among other things. For example:

Most moons have/has/will has/having been spinning for hundreds of thousands of years.

Before the gap, we see a plural ‘moons’. We must match this with the ‘have’ form of the verb, which rules out ‘has’. The word ‘been’ after the gap tells us it is some form of past tense, thus will has’ is ruled out (‘will has’ is just a wrong joining.) While ‘having been’ makes sense, vital punctuation is missing which prevents it from being the correct choice. We would probably need an embedded clause with two commas –

Most moons, having been spinning for hundreds of thousands of years,

plus a second second part of the sentence –

Most moons, having been spinning the same way for hundreds of thousands of years, can be thought of as old fashioned, stubborn rocks set in their ways.

(If you’re a scientist who knows moons never spin the same way, please let me know.)

Therefore, ‘have’ is the right answer, as it provides a completed, grammatically correct sentence that makes sense.

Tip 4, then, is pay attention to punctuation. This will guide you as to whether you should be creating a longer complex sentence, or a smaller, simpler one.

Anyway, to the point of this post. After finishing a piece of work, full teacher mode often sees me ask two follow-on questions:

What was tricky about this?

What helped you?

It’s really good practice to spend a minute or so at the end of any session to review what has been learned. (I call this a Magic Minute After Brain Boost, in the chapter Grab a Mab in my book, Success in Multiple Choice English – 59 Easy Ways to Score High in your 11plus Exam). A Mab helps convert the topic into memory, while also allowing the brain to relate to what has been taught, as it reminds the learner that it is how they interact with the information that makes the difference. Good learning is an active and mutual process.

My Y4 student’s brilliant reply instantly taught me a new question! Her answer to what helped her was that it was fun to learn new information about St Paul’s Cathedral (the topic of the cloze passage).

Fun.

Of course. She wanted to keep reading because she was enjoying learning about the cathedral’s history. So, the third question I am going to ask from now on, and which I hope you will ask your child from now on, is

What was fun about this?

With my own kids, I did this all the time. I loved learning, my son loved learning – always. We had fun. Our attitude was that it should probably be impossible not to pass the 11plus, if only because we spent so many fun hours learning and being fascinated by information, skills and making improvements to our writing, our timing, our scores.

The 11plus is fun! Please, please enjoy it. Enjoy the extra time you are both sharing, the path you are on. Asking what was fun or enjoyable about a learning session immediately focuses the brain on actually finding something that was fun. Children love fun. If learning is fun, they will stay at it longer, and may absorb deeper learning.

Keep it consistent, keep discovering things your child doesn’t know, keep learning to fill those gaps one at a time…and keep it fun.

Have an amazing 11 plus day. Click here for targeted English resources on Multiple choice and both fiction and non-fiction creative writing ‘must-have’ skills.

Lee

How can you help your 11 plus child in the summer holidays? Try this 15hr weekly plan.

(Part 4 of a 4-blog mini-series.)

Actually, it looks as if it will be a five-blog mini-series; there’s a lot of info to help you. All to the good. The last time we spoke, we looked generally at morning and afternoon patterns of learning. What follows is a zoomed-in look at a day from an effective weekly routine.

Week 1: Monday

9.30 a.m. – English multiple choice test – 50 mins.
A small 10-break, then mark the test. You can mark it together, asking your child to look at the supplied answers and check against their paper. Ask them to play at being the examiner, not getting upset at wrong answers, but rather being curious to know.
Identify the learning areas your child got right. For example, did they score highest in spelling, punctuation, grammar or comprehension sections? Note this and see if the same thing happens on the next test.
Identify the learning areas your child missed marks on. Note this and see if there is a pattern on the next test. Did they score lowest in comprehension, or did they not see the tricks being played in the punctuation questions? Be very upbeat about discovering these areas. You are both playing detective to find out what the next area is that they are going to be brilliant at.
Suppose comprehension was low-scored. Looking at the reading text AND the questions, can you work out together why it was tricky? For example, it could have been a misunderstanding of vocabulary. Were there a lot of words your child didn’t know? How did this affect the score? Was it just choosing the wrong meaning from a list, or did the misunderstanding lead to a misreading of the meaning of the text, perhaps the motivation for a character’s actions. Or was it the questions themselves that were misread? Was it even something to do with the tricky way the answers are laid out like traps? I found so many tricks in both the questions and the answers of most multiple choice English tests that I wrote a very helpful book explaining them all, along with explanations of what your child can actually do to beat those tricks and boost their scores.
To finish the English session, pick up on an area of weakness immediately and learn something together. Suppose there are often lots of words your child doesn’t know (indeed, even if they do know lots of words), then start a daily habit of learning 5-10 new words a day. You could do this in a million different ways. Take the letters in their name and find words in a dictionary or thesaurus beginning with each letter; find five words that start with the same letter; choose one word and its meaning, followed by a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word; focus on verbs only, or adverbs, or nouns, etc; find five words that use the same prefix, e.g. indecipherable, inhumane, innocuous; five words that end with the same suffix, e.g. courageous, advantageous, epigeous. You can make a game of it, using a dice to find a word to land on. Alternatively, if punctuation is an issue, have a twenty minute learning session on how to use a particular mark, e.g. semi-colon. Once it is half-understood, put it into practice and have your child write sentences using the punctuation mark, or have them deliberately fool you by leaving out the problem punctuation mark, which you have to spot.

If you’ve spent 2hrs on a session, not including breaks, then that might be enough for a day’s targeted learning. Let your child continue with their day, BUT HANG ON…Remember to include other good learning habits, such as daily reading later in the day, shared loud reading to each other, listening to audiobooks or programmes that use formal language such as nature documentaries, leaving background programmes on that use formal language, such as Radio 4 documentaries, and avoiding over use (or any use) of electronic games that might zap their mind and undo the good work you’ve just done. You are trying to lead your child into the zone, into a summer holiday mindset of learning and thinking, with minimal drag from activities that don’t support learning.

If you haven’t used 2 hours, or fancy targeting 3-hours, then you could have an hour away before repeating the process for Maths, or verbal/non-verbal if your choice of school tests using these. By week 3, it would be very helpful to make time for different subjects in the same day, to build stamina and to give the brain experience of switching between subjects, which they have to do during their real test.

Okay, perhaps we’ve covered enough for now. Hmm…and we’re only at Monday. This is turning into less of a mini-series and more of a season box set! It all matters and all has to be covered. Make sure you read the previous blogs to help you catch up with where we’ve got to.

Thank you for nurturing your child. Start learning, stay learning and stay 11plushappy!

What should I do with my 11 plus child during the summer holidays before the test?

(Part 3 of a 4-blog mini-series.)

It’s getting serious now, right?

A week remains until the summer holidays. After this, a long stretch of time lies between your child and their 11 plus exam in September, or the months that follow shortly after. You, or your child at least, are going to have a lot of time to spend. With hand on heart as a dad and teacher, how your child spends this summer time is going to make a huge difference to their chances of 11 plus success. Do nothing, do little, or do unfocused learning here and there, and it is going to shrink their opportunity. Meanwhile, put a plan into action that targets test-sitting combined with constantly being on the look out for things your child can’t do, then addressing those areas until they can do the things they couldn’t do, and you are adding jet engines and super-boosting your child’s chances of success.

In brief, that really is your summer holiday learning routine. Combine test experience, text skills, subject skills, reinforce strengths, hunt out and be happy about discovering problem areas, and deal with those areas with love, humour, belief and a marathon runner’s approach to one mile at a time, one problem at a time.

The holiday gifts your child 6 weeks of time – a half term of learning, that you can dedicate to 11 plus subjects. My daughter was running away in English at this point, but would only score around 50% in 11 plus maths tests. Within six weeks, it had all changed and she made it to her first choice grammar. We were learning until the minute she stepped out of the car for her test. #useyourtimewell.

Your first consideration is probably work and child care arrangements. If there are moments of time you cannot move, then block them out and feel fine about this. You are living, you are alive, and being alive takes up the majority of our lives!

Now, look at your free time, or look at the time that can be created in the place and with the people looking after your child, supposing this isn’t you. You are going to find fifteen hours or so in a week for their learning. That is still going to leave a huge amount of time for play – an essential non-negotiable – and the rest of life. But fifteen hours is an effective amount of time to commit to 11 plus learning.

Monday to Friday – 2/3 hrs in the morning, leaving their afternoons and evenings free, is a very intelligent approach to try. Why? Your child does their learning before anything else, so arguments about “Can we do this first?” don’t need to happen. They will quickly understand the routine. Equally, they will be generally fresher, not worn out by summer heat and activities, so may focus better. Perhaps most importantly, if your child learns on a morning, then for the rest of the day, at some level, their brain is considering or processing the information, so in a way, twice the learning time is achieved. Do it the other way round, and your child may be thinking about their morning play session during their learning. They don’t get the same background processing opportunity.

Having said that, in a lot of circumstances, a quality morning routine may not be an option. There are benefits to to starting later in the day. If your child does a sport, or has a couple of hours in the park, then their brain could benefit from the positive effects of exercise on education. They may be less restless because they have shaken out all their sillies, their brain is lovely and oxygenated. In this case, they could be better focused.

Perhaps a truly wise routine might change things occasionally and blend morning and afternoon sessions. It is recommended that when sitting mock multiple choice or written papers, your child has experience of 9 a.m. and 1.30 pm starts. In the real test, they could be asked to sit at either time – you can’t choose – so asking your child to be aware of how they are working/feeling/thinking at different times of the day during a test could help them manage either situation on the test day. If your child struggles to get going on a morning, for example, getting up earlier and waking their brain up with some pre-test sums or spelling could help them be alert by the time 9 a.m. comes around.

Okay, 15 hours a week. Join me in my next blog, which I’ll try and do tomorrow, for a zoomed-in look at specific subject/strategy/test routines.

Have an amazing day of learning. Please consider the happy hacks learning series of English books at www.11plushappy.com as resources for you. They are 110% focused on 11 plus exam techniques and content your child is going to need on the day.

Let’s speak again tomorrow. Found this blog helpful, or have more questions? Please leave a comment or get in touch lee@11plushappy.com @11plushappy