Well, another week means another opportunity to help your child as they prepare for their 11plus. How is it going? Two very simple messages today. One is up there in the title. You CAN do this. Thousands of children do pass each year, these schools do exist, they do accept children, and you have an equal chance to any other parent-and-child partnership of making it.
The second message is vast in its smallness: you, as a guide, only have to be one step ahead of your child when it comes to teaching them a particular skill. You don’t need to be a teacher, you really don’t. You don’t have to know the whole curriculum. You really don’t. You’ll end up knowing the whole curriculum, but you do not need to know everything to start.
Rather, spend the day or evening before a session with your child learning the one topic you are planning to cover. With the online world, you are never far from finding dozens of resources and lessons and free videos to get going. Choose 2-3 resources ( I think it’s useful to have different approaches to a topic, to help you take a broader view) and spend an hour looking at the information.
As long as you’re prepared to be a beginner, and as long as you don’t worry yourself about what you don’t know, you’ll make great progress, and you’ll help your child make progress.
It’s not about what you know now, it’s not about your own educational background. Honestly, it’s not. When I was helping my first child, I realised there was so much maths I hadn’t learned or remembered from school. Even at teacher training college, several tutors brought up again and again that there was a belief among many student and professional teachers they were not ‘good’ at Maths, which was totally false, and based on either old-school learning or the fact that as we hadn’t used it daily in our lives, it wasn’t in our working memory. I actually fell in love with maths only at teaching college; at school…well, I hardly remember anything from my own primary lessons. Yet I learned it along the way, or rather re-learned it, and now I teach it with a real fascination and passion, alongside my relentless passion for English and the spoken and written word. My first helpful book was the original Bond How to do 11 Plus Maths books, which had short, but so incredibly helpful, introductions to many of the subjects. Each step takes you onto the next step.
We are grown ups and we can help our children and we can feel good, not bad, about teaching ourselves just enough to guide them. These are tests for children, so please remember that. They are designed to be tricky, they are designed to catch people out, but they are also designed to be passed!
So please, breathe out, smile, and remember:
- You can do this.
- You are not alone.
- You only have to be one step ahead in one subject.
- It is definitely okay to learn along with your child.
- It’s okay to say, “Ooh, I don’t know about this yet, let’s go and find out.” Admitting you don’t know everything will often make your child feel better about learning, as they realise it’s natural to not know things!
Okay, 11plus parent, okay 11plus tutor, okay, 11plus child-superhero – have an incredible week. Time is our greatest tool. Smiling and relaxing might be our second greatest tool. Now, you can go to the subject at hand and learn your way through the week.
Start learning, stay learning, stay happy. Lee
