Son struggling with worded maths problems and comprehension

[Pecal]

Hello,
My son is in year 5 and is preparing for the 11 plus.

He is finding worded maths problems very difficult to solve; he’ll read the question but won’t understand what he needs to do. Often he will use the wrong operation on the wrong numbers: multiplying two numbers instead of dividing.

to be honest, the 11 plus questions are much, much harder than his normal school work.

Have you practiced understanding the questions with him?

i.e before even thinking about the answer go through the question and underline or highlight the important words. Put those words together and think about what the aspects of the question are.

He could draw out the question as he reads through it so he can visualise it.

Use practice papers to go through slowly with him and then on his own finding out what the ideation is asking rather than the answer.

The difference between the 11+ and general school work is that the school stuff is generally taught explicitly. It’s very spoon fed.
A good part of the 11+ isn’t taught at school and requires critical thinking and a lot of ‘thinking outside of the box’ ie the verbal and non verbal reasoning questions, so a lot of kids have never come across these types of concepts before.
This is why most children have tutoring for it.
He’s either not a good fit for it or he’ll need a lot of tutoring to get used to the types of questions.

If he is taking 11+ to get to average private school then you have still plenty of time and with hard work he will get in.
If you are thinking about superselective grammar or private then it may be a time to realise that there are kids ahead of him who are better at maths.