How do I prepare my DD for 11+ exam?

[MichMC]

How do I prepare my DD for her 11+ exams coming up in the next couple of weeks when her mock results were disappointing?
I know she has what it takes and in practice at home she gets good results. She is not particularly nervous of taking the exams but is making silly errors. I am trying my best to be encouraging. She really wants to go to the grammar and does not want to go to the alternative, the local secondary.
Would appreciate your thoughts.

It may have been the pressure that caused her to not do so well in her mocks. She may be rushing and making silly errors. I think it is not a bad thing for her to make some errors because she can retake these questions again and learn from her mistakes. I would just keep practising with sample papers, until it becomes routine.

Good luck for the real exams!!

Hi MichMC
Which school is your DD trying for?

I agree with Cliag; practice makes perfect.

We went from very varied performance; anything between 50-80%, to consistantly high papers, just from getting our son to do them over and over again. It was a real pain at the time, but he gained a lot of confidence and on the days of the tests, found them fairly easy.

When we were doing practice papers for the 11+ and my ds made silly mistakes, I made him go back and find them himself. It was so frustrating seeing him lose marks for such simple errors that he could spot easily when he bothered to look properly. Then he would havre to do them again obviously.

I'm afraid there was alot of bribery going on in our house during the run up to the exam, ds would get an extra pack of football cards or whatever if he completed the practice paper without making silly errors. That helped get him into the habit of reading each question twice to ensure he had understood it rather than just doing what hethought first time. Reading the question twice is the most important thing I think, and practice.

We haven't found out results yet though and he may not have passed, so my methods might be useless!

Ugh! Wrote all that and then realised how old this thread was! I guess I should take my own advice!