Planning and Preparation
The 11+ can be difficult and is not suitable to every pupil. This guide will help you to gauge whether the 11+ is suitable for your child, and how to prepare if your child desires to sit the test.
The Level your Child is at.
You can use 11+ practice resources and other information to help you evaluate the level your child is working at. For example, you might be able to get information from their schoolteacher about their strengths and weaknesses, and possibly how well they’re expected to do in their SATs.
This will give you a clue of whether your child would thrive in a selective school. These schools are often highly competitive and a child who passes the 11+ can still find themselves at the bottom of the class, struggling to keep up.
Be Aware of what your Child Wants
11+ Preparing can be a lot of work. Ask your child’s views about the 11+, and about the schools you’re applying to. Ask yourself these questions about every school:
- Have you visited the school? Did your child like it?
- Are all your child’s friends going to a different school?
- Distance of the school from your house? Would they do that lengthy journey each day?
- Does the school offer any extracurricular activities that your child is interested in?
- If your child will be ok in a grammar school setting with tough educational atmosphere?
It’s can be easy to be caught up in the 11+ preparation. But don’t forget that you can always change your mind and withdraw your child from the test at any time if you feel the 11+ isn’t right for them.
Make a Plan
Your prep plan will rely upon on how much time you have before the test. Few parents begin preparing quite a while ahead of time, however regardless of how much time you have left until your Child’s 11+ tests, there’s still a lot you can do to support them. For a great deal of children, the 11+ is the first formal test they sit, and it tends to be a tense and overwhelming experience — even a modest amount of preparation can support their confidence.
Make a work plan to ensure you include everything in time for the test.
- Evaluate strengths and weaknesses — use practice resources and feedback from school to assess which areas your child is strong at and which areas may need to pay attention to.
- Time — ask yourself whether you and your child have adequate time each week to plan for the 11+ test. You may need to curtail extracurricular activities or other week by week events to reserve time for it. Many parents believe its effective to practice for 11+ regularly on the fixed time to fit it into their family routine.
- Resources — choose what resources you’ll require. The age ranges listed on many training materials offer advice on their difficulty levelling, yet these materials don’t need to be used exclusively by that age group. One approach to identify how your child may adapt to the 11+, is to begin training with materials intended for lower ages and afterward proceed onward to harder material when they are prepared. This can likewise be a good technique to boost your child’s confidence, offering them to chance to become familiar with new types of questions before they attempt to do more difficult level questions.
What to Put in Your Plan
There are normally three phases of groundwork for a 11+ test:
1) Learning how to understand each question type and learning techniques to resolve them.
2) Doing loads of practice of every question type (focusing on any hard areas and improving speed and accuracy).
3) Doing practice tests to increase test skill.
It can assist with beginning working through Study Books with your child (see p.26). These books take them through each question type in the subject and teach them techniques to assist them answering each one. Spend more time on the question types your child believes more challenging, and work through the training questions with them.
When your child is familiar with each question type, work through Practice Books to improve their speed and accuracy (see p.28). Nearer to the test day, start timing their work and start Practice Papers (see p.34).
Record your child’s 11+ scores — it’ll assist you with tracking their progress and spot areas that need more attention. It will likewise give your child a feeling of accomplishment.
Make sure to incorporate all the subjects your child will be tested on in your plan. It’s usually an effective way to put more effort in the subjects they find the hardest. Investing some energy to work out where their strengths and weaknesses are will assist you with choosing the most ideal approach to split your child’s time.
Breakdown your child’s work into small sessions. 10-Minute Tests proved to be extremely useful — Many books are available focused at certain skills, including Spatial and 3D, spatial, logic and coding, sequences, cloze and more (see p.30).
Learn to Identify Stress and Deal with It
Children respond to pressure in unusual ways, but look out for indicators like fatigue, loss of appetite, unhappiness, withdrawal, stomach aches or headaches. If you notice any of these signs, speak with your child and find out what’s worrying them.
They might be nervous about more things as well — year 6 can be a distressing time for children, regardless of whether they’re not taking the 11+. Numerous schools centre significantly around SATs and the idea of secondary school can be fairly frightening.
Ensure your child sits the test in perspective — in case they’re not offered a spot at a particular school, it doesn’t suggest that they’re less capable than other children, or that they’re a failure — the 11+ only evaluates a few certain capacities.
Picking the Right School for Your Child
Preferably, your child should be working at 11+ standard well ahead of time they step through the examination. In case your child is persistently struggling with 11+ preparation and can’t advance from responding to simple level questions, it might worth thinking whether your child is suitable to grammar school.
Children unable to succeed in the 11+ test most of the time progress to be successful in non-selective secondary schools. Speak to your child to assure them that outcome of their result is not an extent of their ability and every school is equally good and they will be happy whichever they choose to go to. Encourage them not to make comparison with siblings who may have quite recently passed the 11 Plus, or other children sitting the 11 plus test.