Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Primary education

Join our Primary Education forum to discuss starting school and helping your child get the most out of it.

7+ Entry Exam Preparation

9 replies

ScorpioMum · 10/07/2018 15:21

What papers do people use and find useful? Bond papers? What age for a 6 year old preparing for 7+? 6-7 or 7-8?
Did anyone's DC sit a mock exam recently and did you find it useful?

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
efrieze78 · 13/07/2018 15:33

I would say 6-7 as build up prep and 7-8 once you are almost ready!

HoverParent · 16/07/2018 12:11

We went through this last year, and achieved excellent results, we got our top school choice.

Start with Bond books 6-7, then 7-8, do not do any higher even though your kid can do it because it will not calibrate to the test. Except maybe for NVR, then you can do 8-9, because they are simply too easy, you might notice your kid getting bored with the easier ones. But the big message here is that the test is firmly in 7-8 territory, even for the top schools.

Do all the Past Papers you can find online, both girls and boys. Then, sign up for ExamPapersPlus for extra tests, it is worth every penny, we found it to be an excellent resource.

Write stories every day. Not once a week. Every day. Try to aim for your kid having a repository of about ten stories that are fairly scripted, that cover pretty much every setting: School Trip, Birthday Party, Dream, One Scary Night, Christmas, Trip to the Zoo, Day at the Beach, Trip to Mars. The kid should be able to modulate the story to fit the story prompt and be able to produce ten to fifteen sentences with sequential and descriptive wording for each.

Most people underestimate the reading comprehension and writing composition portions of the test. We certainly did. By this time last year, we were acing maths, as in 100% for even the most difficult tests, but struggling with consistent performance in reading and writing (it would be anywhere from 60% to 90% depending on the test.) The last three months we worked exclusively on reading and writing to bring test results up to a consistent 80%, but it never got better than that. If you are bilingual (or even worse trilingual like us), stop speaking any language other than English for the six months leading up to the test.

ScorpioMum · 18/07/2018 21:24

HoverParent, thank you for your excellent advise. How did you prepare for the comprehension and composition? Which books did you use? Sounds like a lot - story writing, math, VR etc Exampapapers, bond papers plus school?! How many hours did your DC study per day? Did you work all summer? Sounds scary...

OP posts:
sanam2010 · 19/07/2018 16:56

Hi ScorpioMum, the following link has a lot of links to free past 7+ papers and the best workbooks for preparation, you will find almost everything you there there.
www.londonpreprep.com/2017/11/7plus-sample-papers/

wowsaidtheowl · 20/07/2018 19:58

It’s really not that bad and it’s best not to stress your child out with too much prep. We started some verbal and non verbal reasoning during the Christmas holidays so DD was familiar with the format by January. She was fine.

AnnieHon · 13/01/2020 14:38

This reply has been deleted

Message deleted by MNHQ. Here's a link to our Talk Guidelines.

Tigermom79 · 13/01/2020 23:37

This reply has been deleted

DV request from user

trinity0097 · 14/01/2020 21:18

We don’t even test creative writing in our 7+ exams, so please don’t go down this awful formulaic approach, it rarely works, especially age 6/7

Tigermom79 · 14/01/2020 22:34

This reply has been deleted

DV request from user

New posts on this thread. Refresh page
Swipe left for the next trending thread