learning vocab for 11+ Any brillinat ideas?

Great thread. Lots of very good techniques. Thanks alll.

Glad they're of use! Wordbuilder is not cheap, granted; we only subscribed for a couple of months and short daily sessions on it still made a difference to DS's vocab.

Curses - wordbuilder.co.uk - not .com!

We used www.wordbuilder.com. I wouldn't say it was fun, exactly, but it did help!

We also used www.questionmix.com/

Bit late for mine then. She has a couple of tests in January for indies. Don't have any grammar schools near us (except the ridiculously competitive super selective which is just under an hour's travel for her so wouldn't be a consideration...she did do the test for practise and scored under the cut off mark so doesn't get to practise any maths and English in test conditions. Oh well!)
Think she will be OK with Indie 11+ as she is really good at English and okay at maths. Just not VR, strangely enough.

CEM is brand of 11+ tests that some grammar schools use. I think any grammar school 11+ test will have some element of time pressure. My impression from gossip, was that CEM was particularly tight on timings.

What is CEM?

If speed is the issue, then DD is doomed. Lots of thoughts in her brain but not much urgency with completing questions...

Just a thought , my Kindle has a facility where you can highlight a word and it gives you the meaning. It's so easy she may be more likely to look a word up there and then than if she has to make a note and go to a dictionary. OK it means investment in a Kindle - but an idea FWIW

Your DD sounds like a dream child to coach for the 11+! I wish you all the best luck.

We bought a 2 pack of Bond CEM practice tests to do before the actual test. They seemed very difficult. My DD said they were true to the test. I then read on the 11+ Forum that everyone found them harder than the CPG CEM practice tests. (We never got to those.) So, in my mind, they are the ultimate test. If she is able to "breeze" through those, you know she is rock solid.

My DD sat the super selective grammar test for our area. She did OK, top third, but not high enough for a place. It was CEM. She said that she didn't even attempt more than 15 to 25% of the maths questions. (She said there were 3 maths sections.) So her vocabulary/reading comprehension must have been rather good to carry three such low scores in the maths sections.
We never studied any lists. She just reads a lot. About a book a week. We've always let her choose whatever she wants, never pushed "improving" books. They would have just bogged her down. We also continued to read to her before bed through year 4. That way, she was listening to more complex narratives than she could have coped with on her own and it was building her up in a pleasurable way.
As an aside, I don't know any child to pass the CEM who didn't practise doing copious, timed maths mock section. Speed is crucial for the math. We didn't bother, because we knew we were not competitive anyway, and that sort of training would be a waste of time for the exams we are seriously aiming at. But if your heart is set on a CEM school, I would say that timing is very important.

Ohtobe, it depends on your starting point. English is not DD's native language and we actively encouraged our own language at home all the way through beg of Yr 5, i.e. reading, CDs/DVDs, TV, magazines only in our language + a Saturday school for that. So clearly English took a back seat - I believed what everybody said about school being enough every day and English would take over anyway. Well, it didn't. Her vocab in English was average for her age whereas in our language it was vastly superior and nobody would believe she never actually lived in the country of that language.

So what I am saying is if kids come from an educated home where sophisticated language and vocabulary are the norm, where good quality literature is being read as a matter of course, where you read and discuss newspaper articles, have quality dinner conversation as a family etc, you don't actually need any of the special vocab work, only technique. My DD knew the vast majority of the words we worked on - just in the wrong language for 11+. So we had a rude awakening and a crash course in vocab building. So you may not need to do any of this vocab work with your DC if the starting point is good.

That said, she loved it and now is enjoying English at secondary a lot more than at prep and doing very well indeed to my surprise as she also has dyslexic tendencies.

DS's yr6 English homework a couple of weeks ago was based on a short passage from Swiss Family Robinson. It hadn't occured to me they would actually use such texts. We are not in a grammar school area.

Hi Ohtobeanonymous

You're not 'lazy and neglectful' nor should you see yourself this way...

Here in Birmingham at least - where grammar schools are part of the state school system & totally free to pupils - admission is by competitive CEM style 11+ exam - which includes comprehension tasks on extracts from books well beyond the normal diet of most 10 year olds.

Most parents are facing a choice between state comprehensive senior schools which struggle to get 40 %- 50% of pupils to 5 A-C GCSEs or the grammars which get 100% to that level - with something like 85% B or better. Now obviously they're the cream of the crop - but coupled with fears on the social side of ordinary senior schools (bullying, gangs, drugs, etc...) and in this area the main options both in special measures - I don't blame any parent for getting serious about the 11+.

But Ohtobe it is entirely optional. If you don't value this you don't have to encourage it/ support it/ do it.

For us, with DD1 attending a primary school with a dysfunctional literacy policy - (no working lending form school library, no books home in KS2, children selecting guided reading books and therefore pressuring children to always chose short, easy books, etc...) embarking on a diet of higher quality literature was both enjoyable and beneficial.

Gosh I feel like a lazy and neglectful parent...I do nothing like this with my children!

DS's head is big on audio CD's as an aid to expanding vocabulary. All those classic books your DD doesn't want to read can be found on CD (many at your library). DS age 10 wouldn't have read Treasure Island but the cd went down well.

Steppemum:

rather than learning words by rote - which rarely stays with you long-term - try playing scrabble or bananagrams (but allow your DC to use a dictionary) - bonus points (or in our house sweeties) given for new word and explaining to us oldies what it means.

It sounds like your area has gone for a more mixed approach to testing (not just VR) - here in Birmingham it's equal between maths/ English Comprehension/ VR and NVR. I think the advantage of something more mixed is that ultimately VR is a more minor component.

one of the things we found with CEM format - was that vocabulary style work (antonymns/ synonymns) often had the hard word in the question with easy words your child would know for solutions. So decoding things like prefixes/ suffixes - identifying the root of the word really can help sort out meaning.

Oddly enough with english/ VR DD1 said that watching lots of documentaries/ various museum trips (with us & school) + lots of reading helped more than word lists.

HTH