Know when to take a break – when 11 plus learning gets too much…

I know – we have to keep up daily learning with our children, especially over the summer holidays, if we are to reach our goal of running out of things our child doesn’t know by the time the exam comes round. In fact, you may never actually need the kind of break I’m talking about.

Have you ever found yourself in a head to head argument with your child over doing their learning? You set them a task and they dig their heels in, or cry, or have a tantrum. Ordinarily, they are fine at studying – they go along with the recommended hours, they have bought in to the whole project of giving it everything – but today, in that moment, rebellion breaks out. Does this sound familiar? If it does, there are two tips that may be worth trying. I didn’t know about these before teaching my daughter; I had to learn them to keep us both sane in those…moments!

Teaching the child that you care for is, at times, a very intense experience for both grown-up and child. You have so much invested in their success, you love them so much, it can be hard to know when to step back.

Okay, I admit, I’m talking about how it was for me and I’m imagining it might be the same for you, at least occasionally. Due to that intensity, to the commitment to the goal of giving everything to the process, I found it hard to deviate from the timetable I created. This was noble, brave and mostly effective. However, it was also at times born out of fear and panic that if I let the moment slip, the time would never come back (true), meaning I might not be able to teach her everything she needed to know. Regardless, there are moments when you have to take control of the situation and think long term, not get caught up in the panic of the moment. So here are two strategies I’d absolutely recommend you try to keep your happiness, sanity, relationship and progress intact and healthy.

1. Acknowledge from time to time that it’s true, it is hard/annoying/tiring/ boring/ taking a lot of time – use your child’s language, the word they have used to describe the situation. Then, use AND to bring them back to continuing with it, rather than using ‘but’ or something stronger like ‘it doesn’t matter’ or ‘I don’t care’.

Examples:

“Yes, it is taking a lot of time AND as soon as we’re finished and sure we’ve learned how to calculate the area and perimeter of a circle, we’re going for a swim.”

“It’s true, it can be tiring to focus on a whole test AND it’s true that it’s also really helping us reach the top mark, isn’t it?”

The ‘and‘ can diffuse small grumbles and truly help your child understand the purpose of a session. You can even teach them to use it themselves, so they learn that even when we do feel a bit grumbly, we can still be brilliant learners and give ourselves the best chance. They might develop a phrase to keep themselves going: “I’m tired and I’m continuing, I’m tired and I’m still focusing,” or something similar. You can have fun with it: “Yes, I’m snappy, and I’m 11plushappy!”

There may be times when ‘and‘ isn’t enough. If a tantrum is breaking out, or you feel you are about to yell at them how important this all is, etc., then try tip 2:

2. STOP. Smile, put down the pencil and completely change the subject or do something else for 5 minutes, perhaps for as long as half an hour. It’s important (and difficult!) to be relaxed about this.

Control the moment and you can take away the fuel of the anger/upset. (The fuel may be panic, fear, frustration, or just simple reluctance.) Go play football for a moment, do some exercise, challenge them to a handstand competition or draw a picture together. Grab a drink and biscuit or fruit, go for a walk. You can make this explicit sometimes, letting your child know you’ve recognised you are heading the wrong way:

“Oh, look, this is funny, we’ve both got cross faces, let’s have a silly face competition for a minute.”

“Ahh, I’ve just remembered, we need a five-minute silly noise break, look at us – we’ve forgot how much we love each other.”

Or you can just action the break.

“Let’s have ten minutes to draw.”

“Time out – see you in ten minutes.”

Recognising how you are both feeling – this is about you as well – can be so helpful in getting the learning back on track. When angry or rebelling or upset, it’s unlikely that teaching and learning will be the best anyway. The brain is not as good at taking information in when upset as it is when smiling and relaxed. A short break in an intense moment can give you the space to breathe out and relax, resetting the mind, which could mean that when you come back, you could both end up doing far more than you intended. This last point is worth remembering. If you stop for ten minutes, it doesn’t mean you lose those ten minutes. You can subtly add them on to the session when you come back.

Step 2 is not for using all the time; you won’t need it all the time. Mostly, step 1 can help you keep on track. But nevertheless, there are key moments when you can learn to see you are both getting wound up. During every second of an argument, no learning is happening anyway! So knowing when to walk away for 5 minutes, change the subject or activity for a few minutes (“Oh, I’ve just remembered, you need tickling.”), to allow you a route out of the argument, is a really helpful tool when you remember that you are involved in a learning marathon.

Hopefully, you won’t need these tips much, but if you recognise any part of our discussion above as being true to your own situation, then I hope and and stop provide you with two more ways to continue helping your child reach for the stars and be the superhero that the 11+ student really is.

Found this helpful? Please share and visit https://11plushappy.com/ for more ways to help your child. You can sign up to receive new posts, grab a free course on micro-managing time during learning and the 11 plus exam itself, or take advantage of a better-than-half-price summer learning ebook bundle deal.

Thank you for nurturing your child’s 11 plus opportunity. Have an amazing, fun day of learning together.

Best, 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 does a successful 11 Plus routine look like?

(Part 2 of a 4-blog mini-series)

In the first post in this series, we began examining why routine and time are such vital tools in giving your child the best chance of 11-plus success. I promised to show you one such routine, so here we are. The table below shows you what my son and I did together in a typical Y4 week during school term. A holiday plan will look different and I will show you an example of this in the next blog.

I’ve shown you the reasons for each part of the plan. It’s crucial to have a why for each study session if you are going to help your child run out of things they don’t know and can’t do by the end of your preparations. For a few seconds thinking at the beginning, the rewards for focusing are huge.

You’ll see that in Y4 I only put in around 6 hours a week, instead of the 9 hours or more I recommend for Y5. It’s enough at that age, when you are teaching knowledge and subject skills rather than teaching and rehearsing test strategies and time-management.

Here’s the big deal though: I didn’t find those 6hrs all at once. I used bits of time here and there throughout the week. You don’t eat a day’s meals all at once, you eat them one meal at a time, one bite at a time. This is a good analogy for learning. What matters is that you use the time you have while it is there and don’t let it slip away.

Sticking with the meal image, you eat meals throughout the day to make sure your nutrients and energy are delivered slowly and regularly, so you are in the best health. With 11-plus learning, you need spaced learning throughout the weeks and months to allow the brain to digest the information over time. Cramming everything in at once is like gorging breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks all at once. Nutrients are wasted, the body suffers and cannot use the energy and vitamins effectively.

Three more reasons why routine is the lifeblood of learning: it helps memory, helps normalise good learning habits and slowly draws your child into the ‘zone’, into a mental space where they are focusing on all things 11-plus as they approach the exam period.

Memory. We forget a lot of what we learn just half an hour later. If we repeat things through routine, we’ll remember more. We just will. We just will. We just will.
Habits. Your child will hopefully resist less and appreciate why learning time is so helpful. They’ll spend more time by design learning, rather than watching tv or playing computer games if time is not planned.
The zone. An imaginary, yet real mental space. In the few weeks before the tests, you want your child focusing on only the exam. Note that I say focusing, not worrying. Never worry. Plan and execute.

“Don’t worry, work.”
Mr Jackson, Dalry Secondary School
(My physics teacher!)

The time you spend worrying you can spend learning something instead. Getting your child used to spending this planned, weekly learning now should make the final approach, the last couple of months leading up to the tests, effortless and smooth. (You are also building their study skills for later use in GCSEs, but as we are only thinking about the 11-plus, that’s just an added extra!)

Okay, have a look at the table below. Think about how you are spending your week, think about where you can find time, and then make a plan and start. Oh, and this is the first time I’ve used a table in a blog, so if it goes a bit strange when you are looking at it, please let me know, I’m still learning!

In part 3 of this mini-series, we’ll consider a holiday routine. Thank you as always for helping your child.

Stay happy, Lee

Plan during school term	English	Success Reason	Maths	Success Reason	Superhero Time used
Monday	Bond Assessment paper - 100 marks	Writing full answers helps think about finding evidence. Help with spelling & grammar. Experience of managing time.			45 mins (6-6.45pm)
Tuesday	Prefixes. Quick warm up fun activity. (15 min)	He couldn't do them in yesterday's test. Fill knowledge gap.	Bond Assessment paper - 50 marks.	Exposure to different maths to find topics he knows and topics he doesn't.	15 mins 45 mins (5.30pm-6.30pm
Wednesday	Writing: Sentence Starter football game.	Learn new sentence starters and understand that great writing must use a variety of sentence starters.	Interior angles of regular shapes.	He knew angles of square and triangle, but not pentagon. Taught him formula for any regular polygon.	30 mins 20 mins (6-6.50pm)
Thursday			Schofield & Sims Mental Arithmetic Book 4: 1 test. (36 questions) See if he struggles with any area, then have a mini-lesson on this while it is fresh in his mind.	Experience of managing time: Section 1 - 5 min Section 2 - 10 min Section 3 - 15 mins Practice 2-step word problems.	25 mins 20 mins (7-7.45pm)
Friday	Day off, but still do daily shared reading aloud.				20 mins reading aloud. (We both read to each other.) Bed time
Saturday	Bond Assessment paper - 100 marks. 40 min writing exercise - story.	Visit a cafe for 2 hours for fun and long learning. Practice in comprehension; revise and learn spelling and grammar. Put the earlier work on sentence starters into a new piece of writing, plus new writing technique: personification to build mood.	Bond: How to do 11 Plus Maths: 40 mins going through topics.	Familiarity with doing maths & English on the same day, mirroring the test. Securing knowledge and finding an area he doesn't know, then spending time on that until he does know.	2 hrs (9.30-11.30am)
Sunday	Dictionary work: Find 5 new words and write meaning. Writing technique: 3 different ways to start a story.	Develop vocabulary; find a favourite word he can use in the test and in other writing; prepare for different writing questions by learning how the same story can start in different ways.	Long Division: 2 different methods.	He was getting confused with one method. Expose to different solutions. He ended up preferring the first method, but understood it better.	10 min 30 min 40 min (11am-12.20pm)
Totals	6 English Sessions (Plus daily reading every day)		6 maths sessions		6hrs 40 mins

Do you want to know what I did to get my kids into grammar school?

Everything I could, as fast as I could, as much as I could, for as long as I could…until the job was done (which was their achievement, not mine.) You can find out everything I did in the books I’ve written. I feel so passionately about passing this learning on, so much so that I am working really hard to turn my educational writing into a full time job that will allow me more time to share more hard-won skills and strategies with more parents and more children.

I’m also committed to sharing the new discoveries I still make every day from the brilliant children I tutor and teach. Having seen the results that result from giving parents confidence, skills, direction and a guiding hand, it’s a huge mission to help more families and help more children in this crucial step up to secondary education.

Don’t worry if you think you know nothing. You are your child’s most important teacher – always. You can read about your own 11 plus superinfluence in my first book. When I started with my son, I knew nothing at all – and I was a newly qualified teacher! We didn’t learn about grammar schools at teaching college.

This is important for you to know, as it will help you realise that while your child’s primary school will be working their hardest to deliver the primary curriculum in the most challenging and creative ways they can, it is not the job of primary teachers to prepare children for grammar schools or independent school entrance tests.

It’s your job, your child’s job, perhaps helped by the right tutor.

Schools can give your child 80% of the skills they need. Nearly everything, but not quite. Races are won in the closing seconds, the 1%-20% is where it’s at. The 1%-20% is what you can do. What you have to do. As they say in basketball, if you win by 1, you still win.

So if you’re wondering what to do, please preview the books and decide where you’ll start. You can read the first part of each book on amazon. They are solely focused on 11 plus entrance test learning strategies, from how not to be tricked by multiple choice questions to specific features of writing your child must include in any piece of writing.

Your books are available in both kindle (on amazon) and direct download format (from http://www.11plushappy.com). The main difference is that you can print off the direct download as many times as you need, whereas kindle books are entirely digital.

Remember: make the most of the half-term to move your child’s 11 plus learning forward. Time is running out, which means holidays are true learning gifts!

Start learning, stay learning,

My very best, Lee

Bank holidays are fantastic 11plus leaning moments!

Time is one of the most powerful learning tools when it comes to the 11plus. Spaced learning, learning over time, helps your child layer their learning, building up to a full understanding and a full skill set in time for the test later in the year. There is no substitute for starting early and grabbing moments of time for learning throughout a long period. Today is one of those times – a full bank holiday. Help your child commit to 2-3 hours of learning today to benefit from uninterrupted thinking time.

Is there a topic or type of writing your child is looking to improve? Why not dedicate today’s gift of time to doing just that? If you all have itchy feet, take off to a cafe somewhere and turn it into an event.

Today will be gone by the end of the day; always has, always will. Will your child know something new, or understand something they already know more completely, by the end of this day? Could they write a story or a description with perhaps an extra focus on using all punctuation, or using lots of different sentence starters?

Time. It helps. You can help your child. My next blog covers a simply stunning idea, an undeniable power that is at work in all grown ups 100% of the time, a power that you need to be aware of and need to harness and use when caring for and preparing a child for their 11plus.

Start learning, stay learning.

My best, Lee at 11plushappy.com

Turning problems into pictures: Draw out word problems

I’m just about to tutor, but wanted to share with you and your child a step I’ll be covering with my student today:

Make word problems easier to understand by drawing them out.

I covered in my last post why starting at the end of a word problem is sometimes more effective than reading from the beginning. Today, let’s remember that while working through word problems, drawing away the words can also really help. A number of positives might result:

Your child puts it into a shape that is easier to understand. Looking at pictures can be a LOT more enjoyable and understandable than looking at numbers.
While drawing out the question, your child is literally drawing out key words and numbers that matter, separating them from those that are irrelevant, or which may be simply tricks trying to send your child the wrong way.
Re-working a word problem into pictures helps the brain process the maths involved in a creative, low pressure way.

An example, you say? Sure…

Three equal boards are cut from a longer board. The leftover wood is 24 cm. Each length of cut wood is 3.5 times as long as the piece that is left over.

Q: a) How long is each cut piece?

b) How long was the original board of wood in metres?

Why don’t you and your child have a go at drawing this out?

Here’s what I tried:

It’s not an art lesson – don’t spend valuable minutes making a neat drawing no one will ever see. The idea is to sketch it quick enough for you to see what the question is asking you to do.

Personally, converting words into pictures really helps me. Yes, I teach, yes, I write books, and yes, I still work better with pictures than numbers a lot of the time. I want to get to the core of the maths as accurately and as quickly as I can. Similarly, your child wants to know what maths they need to answer each question. It sounds obvious, but in a long word problem, it’s easy to get drawn into the story inside the question.

If your child started at the end of this question (please do read the previous blog post), they hopefully saw that “what finished looks like” is a length in metres, which means that the maths they needed was logic (what is going on?), arithmetic (multiplying and adding) and then finally converting between units.

Okay, my student’s at the door. Please let me know how you get on with this step, or if you already use this strategy, please share any variations that work for you and your child. Any questions, contact me at leeat11plushappy.com. Remember to sign up in the box on the right for your free course on how to use time in the 11 Plus.

Looking for extra resources? You can get 50% off the 11 plus books on this site during the Easter holidays. Use the code: EASTERHAPPY at the checkout.

Start learning, stay learning. Lee April 2019

Are you thinking about the 11plus? Think multiple choice! Here’s why…

Half term has been full of teaching and tuition, which I absolutely love, and here’s the one urgent lesson that’s come out of every lesson, from Y3to Y5, and from every chat with parents after each lesson:

Multiple choice. Multiple choice. Multiple Choice. To put it another way –

Q: Which of the following is absolutely the gatekeeper to nearly all good grammar schools, and thus must form a huge part of you and your child’s 11 plus learning journey?

A) Multiple choice

B) Multiple choice

C) Multiple choice

D) Multiple choice

E) All of the above

Of course, it’s E. This is a big, big deal. Nearly all grammar school tests use multiple choice tests as either the only test your child sits, or as a Stage 1 test which acts as a very real gatekeeper to a school’s Stage 2 test, which will be written, full answers and not multiple choice. Your child HAS to pass the multiple choice test to be invited to the Stage 2 test.

So, if your child is a brilliant writer of stories, persuasive letters, descriptions and full written comprehension answers that give brilliant explanations and answers, they may never get the chance to show their glory! Unless, until, they pass the multiple choice tests.

The solution? Patience, action and practice – but don’t just let them sit the papers. Teach them how to sit the papers. How do you do that? By exploring how they are laid out, by exploring the tricks and kinds of questions multiple choice tests are made up of.

For example, your child has to answer on a separate piece of paper by marking a series of lines like this:

Teach your child to beware of 3 dangers!

Don’t think it’s easier because you don’t have to write anything. It’s a reading test, not a writing test. I’ll come back to this point in my next blog post.
You can identify the correct answers on the question paper, perhaps by circling or underlining them, but forget to transfer the answer straight onto the answer sheet. Suppose your child finds the correct answers to the last five questions, but runs out of time to transfer them onto the sheet – they lose the five marks, even though they found the right answers. It’s best to transfer one answer at a time as soon as the correct answer is discovered.
It’s very easy to mark the right answer in the wrong box. Suppose your child misses out a question that is taking too long. Suppose also that the next question turns out be easy to answer and they mark the correct letter on their sheet – but accidentally put it in the box that belonged to the previous question. Again, a mark missed. How often does this happen? Very often. Children sometimes don’t realise until they reach the end of their paper and find that either they have spare rows of answer boxes at the end, or else there is not enough space to answer the question they are on. Dangerously, if this isn’t realised until the end, there may not be enough time to figure out the first place they skipped or wrote in the right answer to the wrong question. This means lots of questions which they have answered correctly are all in the wrong place, so lots of points are lost. From one mistake comes wipe-out.

Encourage your child to dot or put a very small mark on the answer sheet next to the numbers of any questions they are leaving out, so they know a) to skip over that row of boxes, and b) can quickly return to any questions they missed out when they have finished the test. (They should have spare time left if they are using the 7 Superhero Powers of Time, which you can sign up to learn about for free on this website. The sign up form should be to the right of this post.)

Encourage them to do the simple repetitive step of checking that each question number matches the number on the answer sheet. Small step, huge difference.

So, wherever and however you are learning, remember: multiple choice, multiple choice, multiple choice.

Good energy and luck for today’s learning.

Stay 11 plus happy, Lee

Brand new 11plus material for your child!

How is your 11 plus learning going during the Christmas holidays? I hope profoundly that you and your child are making time between the celebrations. Time is perhaps the number one resource in preparing for 11 plus success…and with that in mind, I’ve used my Christmas break to work, prepare and finish 4 brand new 11 plus English tuition resources for your child/students. I’m so excited you can now get your hands and brains on them! Find out more here. Your just-released downloads include:

Grammar School Success for Multiple Choice English – 59 Easy Ways to Score High in your exam. This is brand new material – you can’t find this information anywhere else!
The 11 Plus Creative Writing Guide – 21 ‘must-haves’ of successful 11 plus writing.
11 plus Creative Writing Examples & analysis – Fiction Edition!
11 plus Creative Writing Examples & analysis – Non-Fiction Edition!

Remember – the best time to start learning is always now. Visit www.11plushappy.com during the holidays and give your child the help they need.

My very best, stay 11plushappy!

Lee December 2018