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!

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