Six suggestions to make your child’s 11-plus preparation hassle-free and productive

1 – Use past exam papers correctly

When preparing for 11-plus, parents sometimes (I am included) make the mistake of rushing through past papers and missing out on vital learning opportunities.  After a period of trial and error on my part, one approach I have found to be effective is:

A) Ask your child to complete the paper.  They should work slowly unless there is a time limit and always carefully. If you have the time you could complete the paper along side your child (I will explain why this is effective in another post).

B) Working with your child go through their answers.  Please don’t focus on how many marks to give an answer: discuss how your child’s answer is similar or different to the example answer (or your own answers).  Highlight important concepts in the solutions and compare them to your child’s work.

What could be done differently? Which key skills do they understand, and which ones need more practice?

C) Ask them to repeat questions which they could improve– maybe not on the same day!

If you are confident that they know what they’re doing, they can try again without the solution.

If  less sure, ask them to work with the example answers next to them. 

Your child working methodically like this, will gain the utmost learning experience from each task.  Repeating answers is more effective than always writing new ones. Otherwise, students spend a large amount of time just practising their mistakes!

2 – Think skills not marks

You need to focus on skills gained from each paper and not on the marks.  If  this week they got something right that they got wrong last week, lavish them with praise! Do not worry if overall their mark on the current paper is worse.  

3 – Move slowly

Zooming from paper to paper is a bad idea.  Children are likely to keep making the same mistakes and become frustrated.  Take time to help your child learn all the important lessons from a paper.  Also give your child time off!  Make sure they do not feel that 11-plus practice is ruling their life, they will resent it, and that’s no good for their happiness or their exam performance.

4 – Keep going back to old 11-plus papers

Returning to old papers is vital – perhaps from last week, or perhaps from six months ago. There are two reasons for this:

a) As your child develops their skills, they’ll find that the things they once struggled with will come more naturally to them.

b) Nothing is better for a child’s confidence than the realisation that they have already improved.

Week by week, they might struggle to identify their progress.  But when they go back to a paper which they once found difficult, and discover that now it’s easy, they will have no doubt that they are doing brilliantly.

5 – Don’t focus on just one style of paper 

 If your child has been working on papers in the same style, even small differences could be confusing. It is possible that they will not even notice the difference: they tend to answer the question they expect to see, rather than the one in front of them!

To get children to think intelligently during the 11-plus exam, exposing them to different range of question styles will make them weigh questions up properly and respond appropriately to each one.

If an exam is going to be multiple-choice, children should learn to think in detail by working on papers with written answers.

Definitively creative writing practice is invaluable, even if it won’t be in your child’s exam. Creative writing improves children’s writing skills, and therefore boost their marks in any kind of English test. It teaches them to analyse texts better, because they will understand the sorts of choices that authors have to make.

6 – Be cautious about setting time limits

You find that your child is has problems with finishing an exam in time, this are almost always caused by basic gaps in knowledge (times tables?), or by skills which need more work (using quotations in comprehension answer?).  They right way to deal with these things is to slow down.

If a timed paper is full of mistakes or lot of questions are incomplete:

a) Identify the problems.

b) Dedicate time to putting them right.

c) Try the paper again, untimed.

d) Do a different but similar paper, not timed.

e) When they feel more confident, try another timed paper.

If your child still struggles with the paper after steps A to E , go back to point A!  If you take this approach, timed exam performance should develop securely and also quickly. Above all else, everyone will be happier!

If you found this post useful or if you have a question about 11-plus preparation, please leave a comment below! I’d love to have your feedback.