Parents of Year 11's - in the midst of exams!

[OhYouBadBadKitten]

roll up roll up, for our new support thread for all parents of year 11 kids. Whether your kids work hard or not, what ever their goals (or not!) this is our place to de-stress :)

Ds seems to have got into the swing of things, and seemed relaxed this morning, although he's always a little quieter than normal in the car. Revision yesterday was watching An Inspector Calls (recoreded in tv). And then Mice and Men (on YouTube?).

I had a panic this morning. The one bit of help ds has asked for is testing on geog case studies. Geography has been ignored a little recently due to other exams, and I 've only tested him once in the last week. The exam is tomorrow! He seems to feel that the difference between good and poorer marks are case studies. I have on several occasions suggested that, if in doubt, make it up, but he seems to reject this idea!

Well notwithstanding a panic about which texts would be in today's paper and where the clean copies were... dd has gone off reasonably happy.

Eng Lit is one of her A-Level choices and one of her strongest subjects but it hasn't been the smoothest of years.

Like your DD BitOutOfPractice, the teaching's been a mess. Their original teacher genuinely couldn't teach the syllabus - the class had to query so much of what she was telling them. In the end she was replaced but by a cover PE teacher with one lesson a week from the head of English...

It's also emerged that she chose their texts on the basis of what she'd read before rather than what would work best for the class, she also hadn't covered them in sufficient depth so they've effectively had to cram a year's work into the last three months...

Dd's strong enough in the subject to be ok and her coursework came back with high grades; several others haven't been so fortunate

DD has Eng Lit today- Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm. Has been re-reading both this weekend. Insisted on reciting entire texts of both to everyone- aargh!

Our EngLit teaching has also been below standard, so much so that it was the one subject that they didn't sit a mock in. They've really crammed it in over the last few weeks, switching language lessons to literature lessons in an attempt to catch up. It was much easier as a parent to make up for the continued absence in RS - buy the study guides and look at past papers - but I found it harder with literature to come up with the "right" answer. I am trying to adopt DS's stance - it will all be fine.

DD just in from the exam and very glum. She's worried that the questions were very vague, and she waffled. I think she was well prepared though, so hopefully it's not as bad as she fears.

After a total of about 5 hours revision over the weekend, with only about 1 of those spent on Eng Lit, she's just texted it was not great but not terrible. She's bright but I think she's relying on that a bit too much and may get a shock when she gets the results.

Hello everyone. My dd had English today also. She was dreading it - mainly because she gets extra time which takes the length of the exam to over two hours and she was worried about her hand getting tired. It is not her best subject but she seems to have worked very very hard on it so fingers crossed she did OK. She was quite perky this week but looked so tired and worried this morning. She has Maths this week which she is absolutely DREADING despite making real progress over the last few months.

I think I need to feed her up a bit. She says she would like a green smoothie in the morning - what do you put in them to make them taste at all nice??

DD has rang. She does CIE IGCSE English lit
she found poems fine she did Shakespeare.
Passage based question for Jekyll and Hyde was good but the question was bad.

Dd is very very worried in regards to her handwriting apparently it didn't look very readable. Is this a significantly bad thing?

Ds1 said the AQA poem was "a bugger" but Romeo &Juliet was fine.

DD just texted to say AQA Eng Lit paper was good in that the questions covered good topic ranges. We too have had to fill the teaching gaps but fortunately I took A Level in it & did TKAMB for O Level, however sciences not my strongest subjects, so I'm learning stuff whilst talking through revision....aggregates, concrete & crude oil anyone 😆

DS1 was pleased with how English Lit: modern texts went.

At the weekend I came up with three questions for each novel and asked him to write essay plans and find quotes for each.

One of the questions came up in the exam (almost word for word) and another came up in a fairly similar form.

My dd does EdExcel English I think.

I am so much more nervous this week than last week!! I feel guilty as I didn't say goodbye to her this morning I didn't hear her leave!

He was a bit thrown by the fact that there was a copy of the AQA poetry anthology on every desk (the poetry paper isn't until Friday). The school had got confused about which anthology to provide, but none of them have studied the AQA fiction anthology anyway! The lead invigilator had to stop the exam twice to sort out the confusion.

DD was pleased as her predicted character from An Inspector Calls came up and she had revised him well. Her prediction was based on the fact that this character had never come up on an exam paper and as this is the last year of this syllabus he was bound to feature . Thank goodness she was right!

She did Poverty as a theme in Of Mice And Men but somehow changed it to suffering. Let's hope that wasn't a misake.

DT and Latin tomorrow.

Phew.

If there are tiered papers, make sure your Y11s know to check they have the correct paper before they start. DS1 told me that a girl in the linked girls' school did most of the foundation Spanish reading paper she had been given before realising that it wasn't the higher paper that she had been entered for. The poor girl got quite distressed when she realised, and had to be removed from the exam room. There should be a letter H or F on the front of the paper.

My DD was happy with her English Lit this morning. Now we are revising for the dreaded Latin prose tomorrow. I think Latin are the two papers which she is dreading most. Anyway another exam ticked off today.

dd back after English Lit. Was happy with Of Mice & Men and used the quotes she had remembered. Less sure about the unseen poetry.
Next exam is Maths on Thursday.

Re the tiered papers, last year my DS2 completed a foundation chemistry paper before realising. He had completed it very quickly and realised about 20 mins into the exam. He was then given the higher paper and an extra 20 mins at the end.
The school put in a report and he was given special consideration, I think it would have been worth a couple of marks. He has looked very carefully at everything since.

Dd was happy, the questions were exactly what she'd prepared so she had loads of quotes she could use.

Geography tomorrow...

I'm confused by all the differences on here. Please could everyone state which exam board when reporting back because I'm sure quite a few of us would like to compare what their own DC thought of the exam with others.

DD did AQA GCSE. Her exam was short stories and Of Mice and Men. She thinks she did OK, not brilliantly, but OK. She says she didn't mange to finish though.

Apparently DDs English today was Edexcel but was an iGCSE (first I've heard of it) but her second English after half term just says GCSE - so I am even more confused than you.

Todays was her drama and prose, but with no books allowed, the next one is language and has an anthology, an unseen text and a free style essay. She did a controlled assessment coursework thingy, last year.

Do they get two GCSEs from this or just one?

DDs next exam is igcse aqa geography tomorrow

Well the only communication I had from DS after the exam was a text complaining that "there's no filled pasta" when he got home for lunch. I suspect DSD polished it off earlier On prompting he said that the poem was hard (this is AQA), but he "focussed on technique so that's OK" and he managed to time himeself well and finished, which is good as he really struggles with physically writing fast enough as he can't/won't write joint up.

DSD seemed to think the IGCSE one was good and a poem she liked came up.

DD is AQA for everything which makes life easier :)