Which parts of 11+ preparation do children find hardest to master?

[Gigisaffron]

Hi everyone,
I’ve been looking for some structured 11+ preparation material and I’m trying to understand what parents find most helpful.
What do your children struggle with the most — Maths, comprehension, vocabulary, or time pressure in practice papers?
Would really appreciate your thoughts.

Managing their time to get through papers and know when to move on when something is tricky

Hoovering up the basic marks by stating the obvious in English. Doing all the easy maths first as quickly as possibly then having time to spare for the harder content

Essay writing has to be top notch- like an award winning author.

Managing time was the trickiest.

In some areas, like maths - my son was super confident in this, so fell into the trap of rushing through it and not really thinking about the answer, or going back to check. When it was reviewed, there would be errors where he’d either read the question wrong, or put a typo in that was incorrect. It was frustrating because he would always finish way ahead of time, so could have slowed down and/or gone back to check.

As an 11+ tutor I agree with this. Some children find creative writing extremely difficult. Methods to solve equations can be taught but being creative is a different matter.

Really? never thought it could be that difficult. Could you tell me what helped improve the essay writing- endless writing practice, reading, vocabulary building? Thanks @duckfordinner

any tips or tricks to improve it @ThatKhakiLurker ? Thanks

It depends heavily on the format of the test.

However, in my experience the one aspect which is difficult to teach is the vocabulary. Children have either been exposed to a wide vocabulary, or they haven’t.

Interesting. Was he in general ok with comprehension, VR, NVR, Cloze etc? thanks @TakingThePeanutsCarol

Yes, he was better with the others as he knew he needed to think about it more - he was over confident with the maths and therefore rushed through it.

The starting position should always be looking at the specific test or tests the child would be sitting to look at scope. Creative writing can be really hard, sure, but our local grammar doesn’t have it in the test so you can discard that if it was the only test you were doing.

Thank you. Which grammar school was that @PinkPhonyClub if I may ask?

This is a huge exaggeration. Obviously your child will need to be good at it but not even the most competitive schools will require writing of a publishable standard.

Always work to a specific test of a specific school or others overwhelming and time is wasted on things not important for your top schools.

Mine found vocab and creative writing hard. Realised in retrospect that extensive and high standards of reading in primary can help for both of these as slow prep over the years rather than trying to master it in months.

thank you @PlainSkyr . I do believe that small consistent steps can yield big results over time!

Timing was the most difficult thing for my DS. It's so important to see all the questions and not get hung up on one that might be tricky and not see some others that are much simpler. We used a combination of the 10 minute book tests and the younglearners online timed mocks to get the pacing right. The more you do the more you get used to the speed required.

Thank you @Emroche

Some of the creative writing, like the Kent test, is just ticking boxes. The creative writing aspect is actual of minimal importance. Most of the marks are awarded for other things. For example, there are 5 marks available for using 5 different types of punctuation, 5 for different literary devices, 5 for use of complex words, 5 for varying sentence types and structure, and 5 for character development. Only about 5 for the actual creative plot. So I'd suggest your child focusses on the 25 marks available for the other stuff rather than get hung up on writing the next Harry Potter.

My two both struggled with certain types of NVR questions, I think probably because it was so different to the stuff they learned in school

I’ve done it four times and each of my kids found something different hard!
We fortunately don’t have creative writing in our area now and only my eldest dd had to do it. It was her strongest area though.
For me what got them all through was just repetition, staring earlier so the pressure was minimised, mocks were great and we had a great tutor that kept it low key.
It’s a brutal process.

My son hated the 3D nets on Atom. That was his nemesis - only managed to get to strong in it.
Of course he was then annoyed to have spent so long trying to master them and none of his tests asked for 3D nets.

We didn't do any tutoring and he did one timed writing practice a few days before just to make sure he could work within the limit.

Speed and accuracy.