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During Year 4 we just concentrated on building strong foundation in English and maths. We didn’t use anything 11 plus specific resources, except for my younger two, two ease the burden of memorising a lot of vocabulary in a short amount of time, we started memorising the 11 plus vocabulary flashcard words.
Depending on the level of your child, start at this level then move on to the next level in the series. If the level is too easy then just skip to the next level of the series.
Extensive vocabulary knowledge is essential for the 11 plus. The best way to acquire these is naturally through reading, but I found my kids just skipped over any words they didn’t know when they read, so we decided to use flashcards, and learn a few a week through out year 4 and year 5.
The set of flashcards we used aren’t available on the market anymore, but these vocabulary flashcards from CGP look quite good and child friendly:
In addition to our normal maths curriculum, we focused on memorising times tables multiplication and division facts. These have to be accurate and fast. We also used this time to practice accuracy and fluency on addition and subtraction facts up to 100.
In addition, depending on the level of your child, start at this level and carry on to the next level:
During Year 5 we continued with comprehension, spellings, vocabulary, mental maths and our normal maths curriculum we were using for homeschool.
In addition, we started some 11 plus specific study using the following resources.
From September to December of Year 5, we worked through these study guides and workbooks to get ourselves familiar with the format of the exam.
From January of Year 5, we started doing one or two of these 10 minute tests from each book of the series.
From May we continued the 10 minute test books and also started doing one practice paper a week from this series. We chose the GL publishers as it was a GL test we figured this would reflect the real exam content.
There is also the CGP practice paper series. This wasn’t available as a pack but we did get a couple of tests from CGP as I thought it might be good to get questions from a different perspective.
Don’t get both the GL practice papers and CGP at once. Most likely you won’t end up using all of them, or you’ll want to use all of them and end up stressed out due to the amount of work.
Something new which CGP published that I wasn’t aware of during our 11 plus preparation until the last month, are CGP 11 plus revision cards in a boxset. As the practice papers were showing a weakness in Verbal Reasoning, towards the end of August I bought one for verbal reasoning, and it was quite fun to use. It made a change from the books and papers.
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