11+ study aids

[winkywinkola]

Which would you recommend?

I found these for £40 which I was staggered at but perhaps they're v good

[Retropear]

What study aids do you want?

If you want vocabulary he/she needs to read a lot so I'd spend the £40 on books.

[LadyMuck]

A school thesaurus will do the job for less £££, but having been through this recently, I think vocab seems to be increasingly important.

[ThreeBeeOneGee]

freerice.com/#/english-vocabulary/1512

[sstressedofstreatham]

Try bofa website. £5 per month

[tryingreallytrying]

READ REAL BOOKS.

No substitute for it. Far easier to learn and remember new words in context and far, far more fun.

Only tutor your child with 40 quid flashcards if you are determined to put your child off English for life.

Apart from reading, there are other fun ways to increase vocab - play Scrabble, Boggle or the add-a-letter game (person A says a letter, person B adds another letter, person A the next etc. The aim is not to finish the word. But you must have a real word in mind at all times, or you lose. So eg person A says P, person B can't say I or A because that would finish the word, so says U, making PU. Person A can't say T because that would make PUT, or S, because that would make PUS and so lose the game (even though there is a longer word, PUSH). So says R, thinking of the word PURE. Person B can't think of any other real word they could make that begins with these letters, so either says E and loses the game because they finished the word, or says "challenge", hoping the other person didn't have a word in mind at all. Person A can then say "PURE", meaning Person A has won.

Cost: free.

Can be played anywhere, with no equipment. Great for practising compound words (can play the harder version, where letters can be put at the front OR back of existing letters, thus testing prefixes as well as suffices, once you have the hang of it). Also good for spelling and visual memory.

[barbour]

Agree with read read read .....and a wide variety, books, newspaper articles, magazines ........no substitute for that ...and have a few (unfamiliar) words of the week, have your child put them in a word book and see if you can challenge each other to drop them into conversations that week. yes and second tryingreallytrying on games with first person and second person completing half of compound words are fun.

[tryingreallytrying]

Ha ha ha - just had a look at those "compound word" cards linked to on the first page in more detail. V amusing. DO NOT BUY THEM! The writer is a semi-literate parent, not a teacher. Hence she imagines that "illiterate" is a "compound word" made up of "ill" and "iterate". Seriously.

The mind boggles. If one MUST teach compound words by rote - which, as an experienced English teacher, I strongly recommend NOT doing - at least learn what a prefix and suffix is and what it is not. "Illiterate", as anyone who is not illiterate knows, is made up of the (unusual) prefix "il" (the common negative prefix "in" becomes "il" here as "inliterate" would be too hard to say), with "literate".

The same set of cards suggests

• limerick is made of lime+rick
  
• caprice of cap+rice
  

etc.

Would be amusing if not dangerous - stupid parents may actually buy these!

[Retropear]

And £40!

You could buy a key ring and make your own for a few pence.

[LadyMuck]

tryingreallytrying, whilst I absolutely understand that these are not compound words in the traditional sense, they are words which come up in the "compound word" section of verbal reasoning tests. Eg "Make a new word by combining a word from the first set (hat, cap, head) with a word from the second set (wheat, maize, rice)". Whilst the product may be useless for teaching English, a good deal of 11+ is about recognising vocabulary OUT OF CONTEXT. Reading helps for comprehension, but the type of questions used for verbal reasoning are quire different.

A child who properly understand prefixes and suffixes but hasn't practised these types of questions will probably be thrown on the day. I can assure you that several of the so called "compound" words listed on the standard 11plus exams sheet came up both in the Kent test and at Wallington grammar this year.

But yes, even for these odd word lists, there are plenty of free resources.

[winkywinkola]

Free rice is great.

Any other recommended resources please?

[GoodnessKnows]

IMHO, they look terrible. Not toe room a terrible waste of £
I'm sorry not to be 'able' to put a link up, but you could copy and paste:
www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/free-11-plus-practice-papers/patricias-11-plus-series-sample-practice-papers/