Year 5 club students taking the Kent Test this September need a programme of work planned for the Easter break.
Plan for your child to complete one half hour per weekday (unless you have family plans and then simply miss that day out).
Do not be tempted to go over time by marking work together and discussing corrections. All the marking should be done away from your child and discussed the following day within the half hour timing. Explain that this timetable allows for the whole day every day to be completely free for holiday relaxation and plans. Just the quick half hour straight after breakfast will build knowledge and that essential confidence they are going to need in spades.
Simply split the half hours with a little home-made timetable. Do alternate verbal and non-verbal reasoning every other day. Just 10 minutes of the half hour, on just one particular type of reasoning each time, is enough to shore it up for the future. Use the other 20 minutes to alternate maths and English.
And here are the links you need. Get everything ready before the holidays start if possible:
English
Each session, complete a page or two of the 11+ Vocabulary book by Rose McGowan
In addition complete one comprehension from the CGP Sats Buster 10 minute test book. These are perfect style-wise for the Kent Test although the real thing is multiple-choice, so discourage full sentence answers. Just the key facts for the score-system is a quicker solution that children often prefer.
These two books are good for those tricky exercises at the end of the English paper:
The CGP Sats Buster Grammar workbook
The CGP Sats Buster Spelling workbook
Don’t start exam papers yet as there are not that many of the best type available and you will need them later on.
Maths
There are a few facts to learn – special numbers particularly and then of course speedy tables facts. Keep the tables for the bedtime routine (see above) if your child isn’t super-speedy already. As for the facts, they will need to learn them. Here is how you go about this together:
Teach your child to learn a set of facts
Those children in our 11+ clubs should take time to look through their maths books together. Copy out example sums and try them again. Don’t battle with new subjects, there is no point as we will be covering them next term. The children are not ready for exam papers yet and again they should be saved as you will need them later on.
Instead, use the WHSmith Challenge Maths books (ideally the one for year 5 and the one for year 6, although we do touch on year 7 work, and anxious children do like a look back over the year 4 work too), and complete the pages on the subjects you have covered already in club sessions. Pick a subject and do the pages for that particular subject in each book in order, before going back to the earliest book again for the next subject.
Maths revision should be active and practical. Reading through is great for a little reminder but not thorough enough an approach without active work to follow it up. Stay positive and simply write a list of anything you can’t solve together and email the club teacher with it.
Verbal Reasoning
Susan Daughtrey is the best. Her bundle of 4 workbooks cover everything your child will ever need to know – although book 3 is purely number based and the one to miss out as really these haven’t come up in the more recent form of the test.
Spatial reasoning
This work comes into the summer term.
Non-verbal Reasoning
All you need is the Stephen Curran Workbook 2 and the whole NVR curriculum is broken into manageable pieces. It matters not a jot if your child can’t do a number of questions in each exercise. But it is important that you go over the exercise together (the answers are explained in stages) and confidence will come as long as your child understands every correction – even if it is with the book’s help.