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Secondary education

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11 plus coaching

35 replies

summer111 · 27/09/2006 18:17

I just wanted to ask some advice of those of you who have been through the 11 plus with their kids. My DD is in Year 5 and we are at the point of considering whether to enter her for the 11 plus next year. We have an excellent girls grammer locally but competition for places is horrendous.
Having listened to the usual school gate chat, some parents have already started having their kids coached, even at the beginning of Year 5. Is coaching so much in advance of the exam really necessary? Where did you look for appropriate tutors also?
I need some objective advice here please!
Thanks

OP posts:
sphere · 03/10/2007 00:55

I am serious about the 30% increase. I am talking about verbal reasoning here. My son took a paper with no prior experience of verbal reasoning tests and got around 60%. After a few months of practice(nothing too extreme) he was scoring in the 90s. I am not the only person to have had this same jump in scores. All I know is that if he had just gone into the exam after trying a couple of papers just before then he would have scored only around 60%. Now, fingers crossed, he should be capable of scoring highly.

In non-verbal reasoning there was also an improvement due to practising. As a rough guess, I would say around 15% improvement. After a while you get in the mind of the question writer and become more familiar with the types of things which can occur in the questions ie Changing number of shapes, shadings, rotations, inverting fill colours etc

Somebody earlier described verbal reasoning as an intelligence test. I think this is the problem. It isn't a measure of intelligence in its current form as used in 11 plus exams. There are many variations of each question type that tend to appear and in my opinion if a child doesn't think of that particular way to answer a question on the day then that doesn't mean he is not intelligent. It means he's not on the same wavelength as the person who wrote the question.

Sorry about all the chuckra mentions. I'm just glad to have found that site. I couldn't believe that nobody else knew about it. I genuinely think that site has played a huge part in my son's improvement. We watched the method and technique videos and noticed quite a few question variations he hadn't thought of.

Saying that practice doesn't improve scores is being idealistic. Schools love to say this so that nobody bothers to practise. You may have research saying otherwise but in my experience (and a few friends) this is not the case.

Celia2 · 03/10/2007 10:59

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sphere · 09/10/2007 11:59

I'm slightly annoyed with Chuckra now. They published the question types which appeared in the first Bucks 11+ exam. It has been removed now so I hope not may people saw it. Although I have to thanks chuckra for all the free 11+ practice questions, posting this information was inappropriate as apparently some people take the same test a few weeks later. Those people could have concentrated on just studying certain of the 11+ question types.

KMM · 31/10/2007 11:59

It is always worth preparing your child for the tests, whether or not they pass.

For some chidren, one-on-one tutoring should be recommended. My daughter is a case in point. I tutored my daughter in math because I have good mathematical ability myself but it required a lot of patience and a perspective of trying to understand the reasons why she was having trouble and then finding a way to help her out of a certain way of thinking. A one-on-one tutor may notice a child's weaknesses or habits whereas a helper in a classroom setting is only telling what to do but not understanding why the child may persist in not doing it (reasons may even be psychological). Subject weaknesses and thinking habits are then worked on as they are uncovered.

When my daughter takes the 11+ test, I've advised her not to let the thought of passing distract her from her task. And her task is to do her best. To do her best, follow the methods she has learned and practiced, don't use anything else (yes, applying is OK but not coming up with something new). Don't mix units, convert, and then convert back if necessary. Mark up your test paper: write down WHAT you are going to do, completely. Then do it. Trust your method and then trust your answer. Don't even look at the possible answers on the answer sheet before you have worked out your answer so that you do not have preconceived notions of what the answer should be. Merely match your answer to the multiple choice answer. At the same time don't assume if you find the answer in the choices, that it is correct. I showed her how I can get almost each of the incorrect answers that were listed as choice for a problem by doing particular things wrong (adding instead of subtracting, giving the amount saved when the question was for the amount paid).

In math, my daughter was in the habit of doing some guesswork especially when under pressure or distracted. Practice is important but the method of getting the answer and being careful along the way are just as important.

For math, she had to learn to get comfortable with decimals, fractions, and negative numbers. I had her practice and memorize 12x12 times tables. I had her practice her 10 bonds (7+3=10 etc) and 20 bonds (14+6=20 etc) so she can doing them quickly. I had to reiterate the definition of even multiplication, adding and subtracting, taking a difference, as well as other basic concepts many many times over. Most importantly, I had HER explain to me HOW she was going about doing a problem so I could discover what was going wrong. Many times we had to go back a step to teaching her some basics that she did not apparently fully understand. It was hard work, but necessary.

I had no idea from the school that my daughter's habits in doing her work were unhelpful in getting the right answer each and every time. She has always been in the top group in her class and all comments about her work have been generally positive. I didn't find out until the summer of year 4 that she needed extra help and only found out when we starting preparing for the 11+ exams (she didn't know her 10x10 times tables at this point). Fortunately I found out then, which gave us a bit over year to prepare. We needed that much time.

Now that she is trusting the math methods by adhering to them no matter what the input, and is more comfortable with numbers other than whole positive numbers, she is way ahead of where she was initially. She has had to work on being careful with her calculations in each step. She has come to understand that getting to the answer may take several steps and there may not be a shortcut. I had to emphasize to her many times over that if you haven't practiced it, don't take any shortcuts, and definitely don't make them up. Understand a shortcut, then practice it, then you can use it in a test because you've then got confidence in it. She has learned not to be afraid of problems that have a lot of information or mixed units by understanding that a problem can be broken down into steps and mixed units must always be converted to the same units before calculations are done with them. We have experimented with measurements. We've taken a measurement from one point to another whilst in the car using the odometer to give her an idea as to how far 1km is. I've had her measure the with of her finger to understand approximatelyhow big a centimeter is. I've had her measure the length between the nuckles of her finger to see how big an inch is. We have gone over and over conversions and how to remember them without memerizing everything. We have measure out 250ml for a cup of tea. We have emptied the juice carton to measure out 1 litre. We have looked at a dice to see what 1 cm cubed looks like. We have tried to achieve an understanding by experimenting rather than doing everything on paper. Some children seem to require this.

I have rewarded her for following a method correctly rather than results. Correct results always follow correct methods, but vice versa is not necessarily true.

If she passes, great; if not, it is not as important as having gone through the preparation and now being set up to succeed anyway. She now knows HOW to learn.

RSVPB5 · 29/11/2010 21:37

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RSVPB5 · 29/11/2010 21:39

Yes why not?

Bobby1978 · 24/02/2012 17:28

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VanessA001 · 16/12/2012 17:54

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sanjeevan · 05/09/2020 16:32

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HandfulofDust · 06/09/2020 22:21

I live ina grammar area. People start tutoring around year 5 or before. You can buy the bond books and do it yourself or at least do the assessments and get an idea of her current level before deciding.

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