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VVV: Very Varied Vocabulary Episode 2: 7 Tips to Help Your Child Grow and Embed a Gargantuan 11Plus Vocabulary! (Preview from the coming podcast season)
Hello! We’re back with Podcast Preview 2, in a season dedicated to the 11plus superhero skill of vocabulary. In our last podcast, we learned why it was vital your child develops a sparkling repertoire of words as they approach the 11plus. Today, I’d like to share 7 ways to kickstart and augment your child’s 11plus vocabulary in your learning sessions and in life around the house. Maybe you’re doing them already – if you are, please let me know how they work for you. Here goes…
- Down-Up & Write (with a drop of the unusual added in).
When reading new words in stories, plan times – perhaps chapter ends, or every few pages – for you or your child to write the word down and look up its meaning. Then take a handful of words and write them into a small paragraph, or a few sentences in ANY kind of text: a silly poem, a shopping list, a letter or email to a relative, a name tag on a plant, a story, a description whatever you can both think of. Sometimes, unusual texts will stick in the mind. Imagine you’ve written adjectives on separate plant pots in your garden or kitchen; they’re there all the time, so your child will be reminded of them if they’re playing near them or watering them. You can gamify this quite easily. “Mahesh, go and water the omniscient onions.” “Ananya, could you water the Vociferous Violets, please?”
2. Make time to read aloud to each other.
It’s a super way to really identify words that are tricky or new, since if they’re reading alone, you won’t hear your child pause or skip. The danger is, if there’s too many skips without taking the time to understand or share a word and its meaning, it can become frustrating, which can lead to avoiding reading (like the Wuthering Heights student I mentioned in the last post).
3. The Word List Board Game.
Look up word lists. You can google ‘vocabulary KS3/KS2’ or ‘ks2 synonyms for said, lists of verbs, etc. I love two resources out there: Banish Boring Words (it’s American, so just watch for ‘z’s when the UK uses ‘s’s, and the U.S. ‘or’ when the UK uses our (we write behaviour, they write behavior) and Twinkl have a fantastic ‘500 11plus words’ pdf if you are a member. (No affiliate, I just use them a lot in lessons, and I bought both the book and the subscription.) However, there are dozens of free lists out there. With a list, you have ready-made boardgame. Grab a dice (you need a dice as part of your 11plus journey – they turn everything into a game!) and roll through the words. You could go backwards, forwards, have a race to the centre of the list, with you starting at different ends, add any rule you can invent. With the word you land on, speak, check the meaning, and write it into a sentence. Even better, why not say all the words on your way to the word you land on?
Actually, on the issue of writing sentences, I’m coming to the conclusion that as we don’t ask children to write sentences in an exam, it might be better to choose 3-5 words at a time, which your child then puts into a paragraph. The extra advantage of this is it will strengthen the understanding of a word, since your child has to work out how the words can fit together.
4. A super solid strategy is to balance modern lists with lists of words from Victorian literature.
I’m in the process of developing Victorian lists, but if you google ‘victorian vocabulary list 11plus’ or ‘victorian vocabulary from novels’,you’ll be amazed at what you find. I’ll post when my lists are compiled.
5. Start, Middle and End.
To help your child write their paragraph, they could choose three words from a list and agree to use one word in the first sentence, one word in the middle and one in the last sentence. They can try this in a whole story, with one word the last word of the story, you have a fun target to aim for.
6. Choose 5-10 words of the week and make them the whole family’s target.
Points are given each time someone catches someone using the word in speech or in writing. Don’t be too serious with this, have some fun. “My need to burp is abating (lessening),” is absolutely fine! Go with your own family limits.
7. Synonym Bagels for see-through words.
This last one’s a teaser, as next week, we’ll look at the sinister, light-fingered, larcenous, vocabulary-thieving evil of see-through words, for which synonym bagels will come to your child’s rescue.
For now, go have fun, go make some progress, find some new words together, do subscribe, and please pop by my little website, www.11plushappy.com, for books and posts to help you and your child achieve 11 plus success. You can also email me at leemottram@11plushappy.com . Thanks for being adventurous and brave and crazy and loving enough to walk this 11plus path with your child. I hope this first episode has whetted your appetite and got you salivating for some syllables. Sieze the moments, and enjoy the time you have learning together. Start learning, stay learning, stay 11plus happy!
Lee.
VVV: Very Varied Vocabulary: A Superhero of the 11 Plus. (Preview from the coming podcast season)
Hello! Good to speak to you again. Did you know you’ll soon be able to enjoy 11plushappy as a podcast? (Season 1 is curiously called season 2 – you’ll have to listen to find out why)
Season 2 will be dedicated to one of the major superheroes of happy 11plus learning – vocabulary. Over 10 episodes, you’ll understand why it’s such a life-changing, exam-winning champion, capable of transforming your child’s writing, reading, comprehension and SPAG-skills, both in the months of preparation and during your little genius’s exam itself. Vocabulary is a game changer, which will help your child make rapid gains in 11plus prep. In this blog, I’m giving you advance content script from the podcast, in order to get you started asap. Let’s ring the bell and dive into the lesson.
Episode 1 – Let’s talk words.
Why is vocabulary so important to your child’s 11plus chances? What’s the big/vast/abyss-like/substantial/momentous/consequential/mammoth/far-reaching deal?
Here are 4 reasons why teaching and practising challenging and exciting new words must be a priority in the learning you do with your child. You’ll see that they all mingle and affect each other, so the list of four is just to help us organise our thinking.
- It’s already a national priority
A first point to note is that nationally, vocabulary has already been declared a priority by the UK education sector.
For example, post Covid, The Department for Education, the national education body for state schools, guides reception teachers to ‘assess and address gaps in language’ and get busy with ‘extending’ vocabulary.’ For KS1 and 2, the talk is of ‘increasing vocabulary’ and ‘developing’ vocabulary. This was prompted by widespread worry from teachers and parents that post-lockdown children had less vocabulary skills than pre-lockdown, and that deliberate intervention ought to be a must-have.
Away from lockdown, other studies have also explored the important issue of a language gap between different socio-economic groups. One of these, by a team called Hart and Risley, suggested an almost unbelievable gap of 30 million words between the richest and poorest slices of society by the age of about 4, in terms of the words that children have been exposed to or use. The study has holes in it, so here’s a helpful link to a catch-up commentary on it from 2015, which I find sane.
What I love in the study is the beautiful idea of mental nutrition, key examples of which are vocabulary and parent-child talk.
What matters for us here is that if vocabulary is a priority of those in the know, then do you think it might be important for you and your child? Hopefully, your head’s nodding.
2. English as an Additional or Second Language?
Another reason you may wish to focus on teaching new words and exposing your child to a rich varied diet of words is if English is an additional or second language for your child. From a purely time factor, if you’re speaking a non-English language as a home language, your child will be less exposed to English words, and less exposed to sources of English words. Where I am in South London, for example, I teach several ridiculously talented Polish and Sri Lankan children, and we find it enormously helpful to include the learning and writing of new, ambitious vocabulary into most lessons. This boosts confidence, comprehension and eloquence in both speaking and creative writing. Your child can only write with the words they know, hence a continuous stream of new words into your child’s life is going to explode progress in English and supply wonderful, mental nutrition.
3. It makes your child a better writer
Your child will write more interesting words and produce better writing. Better writing leads to higher scores in tests. It just does. True, away from tests, published, highly respected authors often opt for simple language with complete success. For instance, some writers nearly always use ‘said’ for ‘she said’, and steer away from synonyms -whispered, breathed, bellowed, etc. But… these authors are not sitting for 11plus exams, where marks are given – I’ll repeat that – they ARE given – for ambitious, extensive vocabulary. Especially if it’s spelled right, which is another reason to teach it deliberately, to give your child time to learn how to write ambitious words without error.
4. It makes your child a better reader.
Reading improves your vocabulary and vocabulary improves your reading. I recently taught a KS3 English genius, who has an ambition to read the classics. She tragically confessed that she’d stopped reading Wuthering Heights at the first page because there had been too many words she hadn’t understood. Needless to say, we’re addressing that in lessons and she has picked up the book again!
Ultimately, it comes down to EXPOSURE. On radio, tv, and in unplanned conversation, we’re not going to come across the wide vocabulary we need to smash an 11plus entrance exam. We’re just not. Your child can’t learn a word if they don’t come across it, so you can really help by putting handfuls of high-quality words in front of them. Even a few new words each session will lead to huge gains across the months of prep, helping your child understand and recognise the wide range of words that tests can use, such as finding synonyms and antonyms, spelling uncommon words, recognising what part of speech (what kind of word) a word is, missing letters, and so on.
Okay, vocabulary. Over to you. Are you convinced? Persuaded? Cajoled? Influenced? Coaxed? Enticed? In our next blog, released on Tuesday, we’ll look at 7 easy exercises to help your child learn and use new words Maybe you’re doing some or all of them already…
The podcast, 11plushappy English, is due to launch early September, giving you another convenient way to enjoy tips and support as you take your child towards 11plus success.
Have a beautiful week of learning.
Lee, London
I’ve updated my ‘About’ page so you can find out more about what drives 11plushappy!
SUPERINFLUENCE: “I am the single most important factor in my child’s 11+ success.”
I know you could have told yourself that, but here’s what that one truth means.
Your child:-
1. Loves you.
2. Believes you.
3. Needs you.
4. Learns from you.
5. Learns everything about how to be, learn and think from you.
Your son or daughter at primary school age looks up to you – and is influenced by you – in way they will never be again.
What this means is that you are in a position of what I call
superinfluence.
Every day, whether you try to or not, you influence your child.
If that’s true, then imagine how you can influence them when you do try.
Deliberate influence directed at a definite target – this is superinfluence. There are five happy steps to superinfluence when we are getting ready to sit and pass the 11+, plus one bonus step. (Begin developing your superinfluence with the English Masterclass Bundle – four books dedicated to multiple choice tests and outstanding 11 plus creative writing.)
1. Knowing that you do have influence.
2. Deciding what and how begins with where.
3. Naming and getting rid of your worries about the 11+.
4. Doing it: doing the influencing. My own mantra is ‘Only doing does.’ Because it’s true.
5. Repeating step 4. ‘Only doing does’ doesn’t mean ‘only doing once does.’
1: Know that you have influence
We’ve been through it already: you do. Accept it.
You launch your child’s life.
Where are you launching them towards? What skills are you going to give them to make sure they don’t just survive life’s journey, but create life’s journey. Be guided by this statement:
Parents who put education first tend to develop children who come first in education.
It’s not rocket science. Speak French, they learn French. Speak telly every night, they learn telly every night.
Speak excuses, they learn excuses. Speak belief and achievement, they learn belief and achievement.
What you want to get across to your child is the message that what matters is
“You, me and learning.”
Because it is what matters.
I’m not saying the other stuff of life is rubbish or less important. I know I’m risking you saying, ‘Hang on, I want my child to play football, or chat with friends, or swim, I want my child to enjoy his computer games, to enjoy his childhood.’
Well, my son, and the other children we know who make it to grammar school, still played football, still swam – they simply did it as part of the learning schedule.
There is time for it all. But at the same time, there is only one time for a best shot at that grammar school.
Your child will enjoy his childhood if you love them, if he or she has a great relationship with you, if they know you care, if you guide them, if you believe in them, if you develop them. Develop them and you set your child up to enjoy childhood days and teenage days and adulthood days and old age.
Be careful of a strange fear in modern culture of ‘putting pressure’ on kids. It’s a feature of language and thought today that some grown-ups sprinkle their sentences with the word ‘stress’ like some people sprinkle salt on their food.
My instinct, from observations on children at school and in tuition, is it isn’t helpful and it isn’t true.
Sprinkling salt or stress isn’t good for you!
Technology-creep, obesity, selfishness, poverty of language, a material-craving, but work-avoiding celebrity obsessed generation – that’s pressure. Not getting a good job when you become an adult and are trying to make a home – that’s pressure. Getting up to your neck in debt because you can’t earn enough to pay the bills – that’s pressure.
Not thinking you are worth, or able, to go for your dream with everything you have – that’s pressure.
The truth is children love challenge. Leave them alone and they’ll argue to be the best at ANYTHING – my spaghetti is longer than yours, I can throw further than you, I’ve got to level 7 on this game, my team is better than yours, on and on it goes. Listen to children talk and very quickly you’ll discover a natural desire to be and do and have the best.
All you are doing is funnelling that natural, fun urge for challenge through the positive filter of superinfluence, and directing it towards learning and developing their mind and character in ways that will help them be ready to sit the test, as well as learning academic and personal skills they will use for the rest of their days.
Reassuringly, the 11+ process is about challenge, not competition. Being the best you can be is very different from being better than anyone else. How can they be compared with another child? Your child is unique – it is impossible. So let them know there is no need to worry or compare themselves to other children. By all means, however, let them compare themselves with themselves! What do they know this week that they didn’t know last week?
Parenting is your job, and superinfluence is your power.
Don’t leave parenting up to advertisers, phones, game developers, telly; don’t let it be influenced by your exhaustion at the end of the day. It’s not always easy, but it’s always worth it.
Best, Lee
Please make sure your child’s Christmas is 11plushappy!
A huge motivational entrance test hello and a very short burst of happiness to remind you that holidays are the best learning present you can ask for – a gift of time to plan and weave in a few happy hours of intentional eleven-plus learning.
Your child can make huge progress during these long days, as well as having a fun break. Please find an hour or two a day to go over difficult subjects, to rehearse different genres of writing essays, or to focus in on a handful of test strategies and techniques to blast your child’s scores and progress. You can do it, your child can do it, you have to do it. As someone who teaches during the holiday – and as a parent who took both his children through the 11 Plus journey – I vow with everything I can that holidays are superboosts of learning. Whatever you are doing, do lots of it this holiday!
If you’re looking for 11 Plus specific English help, there’s a final chance to own and benefit from the creative writing and multiple choice 11 Plus English Masterclass Bundle for less than half-price. You’ll find everything I’ve learned as a teacher, tutor, writer and father to help your child achieve their highest, happiest mark.
I wish you a productive, successful Christmas.
Best, Lee
Are you half-term happy? Holidays are fantastic 11plus learning gifts!
A huge motivational entrance test hello and a very short burst of happiness to remind you the half-term is gifting you time to plan and weave in happy hours of intentional eleven-plus learning.
Your child can make huge progress during these long days, as well as having a fun break. Please find two to three hours a day to go over difficult subjects, to rehearse different writing essays, or to focus in on a handful of test strategies and techniques to blast your child’s score and progress. You can do it, your child can do it – you have to do it. As someone who teaches during the holiday – and as a parent who took both his children through the 11plus journey – I vow with everything I can that holidays are superboosts of learning. Whatever you are doing, do lots of it this week!
Looking for help? Consider the 11 Plus English Masterclass Bundle as part of your toolbox. Targeted, specialised help is yours for less than half-price. You’ll find everything I’ve learned as a father, tutor, teacher and writer to help your child thrive.
If you haven’t yet, remember to sign up for your free course on why time is such a superhero of the 11plus. Just look at the box to the right of this post (assuming you’re reading this online). I’d love you to sign up to the blog to make sure you catch all other posts. (There have been some important ones recently, so make sure to visit and read over previous posts.)
Stay half-term happy! My best, Lee
Reason 3 of “5 reasons NOT to wait until Year 5 to start preparing your child for 11plus entrance tests”
Today’s reason is a big one, often overlooked, even denied. Remember that if you missed the first two reasons, you can catch up on
Reason 3, then, is that starting early, at least in Year 4, gives your child one of the biggest advantages when it comes to scoring highest in tests: time to seek out, find and show your child specific test strategies. In short, you can go a long way to teach them how to sit the test.
Verbal and non-verbal reasoning tend to have repeated styles of questions, many of which your child will not have been taught at primary school. Neither subject is part of the primary curriculum. Nevertheless, if you watch videos or look at practice books in both subjects, you will see that patterns and sequences often follow similar steps that your child can and will get better at if they are shown the pattern or code structure, then practise this on a range of material that gradually increases in difficulty. For example, there are only so many ways a picture can change: size, colour, shading, spots or stripes, direction of arrows, overlapping or separate shapes, moving around corners, and so on.
It’s a very similar story in multiple choice English. It is not taught in any depth at primary school, yet often forms the first, sometimes the only, part of the English entrance exam. Over the years, my students and I have discovered more than fifty ways tests try and trick children. Although I didn’t set out to, I ended up needing to write a valuable book about Multiple Choice English tricks, together with hacks to help children beat them. I found I needed a way to log them to help explain and illustrate to children what to look out for and what they could do about it.
What strategies and practical tips am I talking about? There are far too many to cover in even multiple posts. I’ve ended up writing four books just about the English part of the test. Here, though, are two factors to engage with.
- A huge multiple choice English trick is your child is being tested THREE times, not once. Children can be fooled into thinking it is easier than a written test; they won’t have to write lots of complicated answers with evidence, and the answers are already there! They only have to find them. Easy? Not so. It is a reading test, not a writing test, and your child has to know three ways to read the test. First, they have to know how to read the comprehension properly and swiftly; secondly, they have to learn to read the questions properly and fully – and to watch out for the dozens of tricks that may be hidden inside them; lastly, they have to read the answers very carefully, as incorrect options are designed to look right and catch children out. Again, there are dozens of ways they attempt to do this.
- Time. I wrote at length about how to get the most out of time in my first book. I’ve recently serialised the chapter on time into a free e course, which you can sign up to in the yellow box to the right of this blog post or blog page, assuming you’re reading this online. There are seven major ways to play with and manage time. Knowing these is essential when you remember your child has around 40 minutes in each subject to show 6 years of primary education, one of which they won’t even have completed!
Of course, starting early ensures that you can be thorough and gradual in the learning and practice of these strategies. You may worry that there are too many and that they will only confuse your child further. If you try and teach them a few weeks before the test, you may be right. Strategies are best thought of as habits, learned over a period of time, which become natural and almost immediate. For example, while teaching and looking for the different tricks hidden inside questions, practice papers will be slower to complete. This is fine when using practice tests as a teaching tool, not as an end in themselves, which is an effective way to squeeze more value from practice tests. We know that it is not practice that makes perfect, but deliberate, targeted practice that allows lasting breakthroughs to be made. With time to spend learning strategies, your child can adopt them as automatic thinking patterns, like putting on a seat belt before a journey, brushing teeth at night, or stopping and looking for traffic before crossing a road.
Remember as well that while every question may contain a trick, or at least have a strategy to answer it effectively, not every question contains every trick! If your child has learned the range of strategies and ways to approach questions, (and actually, there are not that many – most children can name the children in their year group, or a couple of football teams, which is about the same number), they are best placed to recognise question and answer traps and be able to work around them.
I hope today’s reason helps you to feel good about starting the learning journey as soon as you can. You are not putting pressure on your child; the longer you can spend, the more relaxed, thorough, and most of all, happy you should both be.
Yes, the first step, always, is to know lots of things. Here is where you can point out and encourage your child to listen well, work actively and positively in class, to be fascinated generally by how amazing learning and information is. This is surely the main aim – to love learning. To love finding out. To love turning not knowing into knowing.
Nevertheless, the second step is to know how to show what you know, how to work through a paper properly, in time, how to read questions properly, how to avoid wrong answers in multiple choice, how to sit the various tests your child will be sitting.
Thank you for reading this far, and for nurturing your child and giving them the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the 11+ represents.
In writing this post, as I did a day back, I realised a seventh reason for not waiting, which needs its own mini-blog rather than a couple of lines at the end of today’s blog. So in the spirit of expansion, this 5 reasons mini-blog series will now last for 7 days. I really hope each reason helps you feel confident about beginning your child’s future today. Please come back tomorrow for Reason 4. Start learning, stay learning, stay happy. Lee
Reason 2 of “5 Reasons NOT to wait until Year 5 to start preparing your child for 11plus exams”
Yesterday, we admitted the important truth that starting to prepare in Year 5 could be simply expecting too much for some children, given the amount of material to be covered versus the amount of time available. Today’s reason, Reason 2, is actually an extra one I realised while writing the reason 2 I was going to tell you about today. I was planning to add a couple of sentences onto yesterday’s post, a sort of P.S. to Reason 1, but there was too much to say on the subject. It was too important to brush over. So, in fact, there are 6 reasons not to wait. Expect this 5-part miniblog series to now have 6 parts!
Reason 2: The age factor. How old is your child? If your child is younger in their year – sometimes they are nearly a year younger than others – that can be an influence on how much they can learn within a given time. As importantly, as a teaching consideration, are the ways they may learn best at a younger age. If you start in Year 4, you have time to develop learning games in the home that can hook their imagination, sense of fun and need to play. You can still maintain a lot of these throughout Year 5, while at the same time developing their stamina to sit longer exam papers.
Two powerful effects of play-based learning:
- It’s more fun and will often lead to longer sessions, as well as helping to build your learning relationship;
- It’s more likely to be practical, and for many children, this ‘concrete’ experience of doing things will help them thrive.
Here’s a link to a simplypsychology article on Kolb’s Learning styles, giving a brief overview of this ‘concrete’ learning style, alongside other learning styles, in case you’d like to have some context. As an illustration, my daughter and I, towards the end of Year 4, opened a Problem Shop in the kitchen. She was the owner, ‘the boss’, and I would post written maths problems in an envelope through her shop door. She would then call me up on a pretend phone (sometimes a real one) and try and explain how she would solve it for me. I would sometimes ask if I could come to the shop so she could show me on paper, which she always agreed to because she was in role as a polite shop owner! This matched her love of drama and was an excellent way to have several, very short ‘lessons’ at spare points in the day. When similar problems were met in practice papers, I would remind her of the similarity to a problem her Problem Shop had solved for me.
Children love to play, and sometimes fun, unusual approaches will stick in the memory longer or clearer than only sitting with a book. (You still need to do this, of course.) To help with measurement, estimation and approximation, we measured spaghetti sticks and then predicted how many we would need to make a path to reach the garden. It goes without saying that we had a lot of fun making the path, especially when it came to going down the stairs. We were also able to discuss how much the pasta would weigh, using the mass of one pack. (Food can be an amazing learning tool.) A similar game was to make a Book Path, laying out every book we had in the house, then learning probability from trying to work out the likelihood of landing on a fiction or non-fiction title, or a title by a favourite or least-favourite author.
It goes without saying (teach your child this sentence opener as a rhetorical phrase they can use in persuasive letters – because, of course, I am going to say it) that what made these games so enjoyable and effective was that I had started long before the test, so I knew I had time to meander and spend important time going through this process. There was less pressure than if we had started a few months before.
Age is not the defining factor, but it is most definitely a strong influence. As I wrote yesterday, part of the reason for starting earlier than Year 5 is simply because you can. So many children can learn ideas and topics not covered until Year 5 or 6 when they are in Year 4 or earlier. Perhaps a more precise way to think about it is that it is more to do with stage than age. What stage of learning is your child at? Of course, you may not know until you try them with material from later years, so go ahead and introduce these materials. For example, I use the picture-rich CGP KS2 Maths Book on children in Year 3. At this point, they have only entered KS2, but the book covers material right up to Year 6, a lot of which children can grasp, or at least begin to grasp as they move on into Year 4.
Okay, that’s the end of an extra reason not to wait until Year 5 to start preparing your child for eleven-plus entrance tests. Thanks for letting me add an extra reason. Please come back tomorrow for Reason 3 – the one I said at the end of Reason 1 that your child cannot afford to you to miss.
Why not sign up to the blog to get the reasons automatically sent to your email? (Remember to check spam or the gmail promotions tab, and to whitelist the blog post.)
You can also grab a free email course on why time is so important to the 11plus – and what you and your child can do about it. If you’re reading this on the 11plushappy! website, check out the yellow box to the right of this blog post.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving your child the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that is the eleven-plus. Have an amazing week of learning together. Stay learning, stay happy, Lee
Five reasons NOT to wait until Year 5 to start preparing your child for 11plus entrance tests
Dear parent/carer,
A plea from a tutor’s heart. The message is simple – if you can, start teaching and preparing your child for the 11plus in Year 4. Whether that’s at home, with a tutor, or both, it is undoubtedly an easier – and possibly more successful – process than if you wait until Year 5. Please note, I am not suggesting you need a tutor in Year 4. You may, of course, decide you would like a tutor (the four corners of that learning team – child, teacher, parent/carer, tutor – can do amazing things) but as a parent or carer, there is so, so much you can do to help your child. Remember that they spend more time with you than any tutor will, so a lot of your child’s progress – and in some cases all of their progress – will come from a combination of your child’s school, you – and your child!
I know many parents will already be at the Year 5 stage. In that case, the best time to start is always now. Today. This moment. Pick up a book and get learning. I know, too, that many children can be successful with just one year. Some children are faster learners, as are some adults, and will already be ahead or secure in many concepts. If your child loves their learning and are doing fantastically at school, then this may be the case.
But…many children need longer. In any case, all children will benefit in some way from an early start. Over the next 5 days, in 5 mini-blogs, I want to spell out five powerful reasons why you are advised to get ahead and get going a couple of years before an eleven plus exam. (Actually, looking back at that sentence, perhaps there are six; getting ahead is, in itself, important.) You probably know, or suspect, most of these reasons already, but perhaps you are holding back, or are just unsure. My hope in writing is to guide you to see that taking action now in your own home with your child is the safest plan.
Reason 1: Simply put, it can be expecting too much to ask some children to learn everything in a year. While most topics are covered in primary schools, your child needs to remember and be able to apply their knowledge quickly and methodically. For that reason, you must go over these topics again in detail in Year 5. Thus, using Y4 to make sure lots of learning is covered and secured is vital.
It’s also true that many children can learn concepts not covered until Y5 or Y6 earlier if given the chance. Sometimes, the chronological nature of the curriculum is about organisation, not simply age. So, as you practise multiplication for example, why not introduce square or cube numbers, simple alegbra, two or three step word problems that need multiplication to solve?
It is also the case that your child needs a good grasp of Year 6 topics for the test, yet many of the tests come at the start of Year 6. An early start at home in Y4 can help clear a path for learning the Y6 curriculum in Year 5.
If everything is left until Year 5, there is a chance your child can simply run out of time to learn everything well in a way that will allow them to apply maths or English knowledge to new questions and comprehensions they will meet for the first time on the day of the entrance test. (If your child’s school of choice tests using verbal reasoning or non-verbal reasoning, starting early is crucial; they will not have been learning these subjects and techniques in any meaningful sense as part of the primary curriculum.)
The situation can become fretful if, as you approach the day itself, your child is grappling with new concepts. Of course, all of the time, even on the day of the test, your child can and will learn or revise something, a gap in knowledge can be filled, a pronoun or adverb can be discovered. However, what happens if there is one area of learning in which your child, rightly, needs more time with to understand fully?
(Quick question: how long does a child need to learn something?
Answer: As long as they need.)
With this extra time, she or he might be as competent as anyone in this area. If the time is limited, however, it may not be possible to short-cut. An outcome is the result of a process. Learning is often a spiral process, whereby you return to a subject periodically or from different angles, allowing the skills and information to become more embedded each time, over time.
Okay, there’s your first reason not to wait. Please come back to 11plushappy! tomorrow for reason 2 – your child can’t afford you to miss this reason.
Why not sign up to the blog to get the reasons automatically sent to your email? (Remember to check spam or the gmail promotions tab, and to whitelist the blog post.)
You can also grab a free email course on why time is so important to the 11plus – and what you and your child can do about it. If you’re reading this on the 11plushappy! website, check out the yellow box to the right of this blog post.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving your child the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that is the eleven-plus. Have an amazing week of learning together. Lee