11 Plus Exams Forum

My DD is struggling with cloze passages and jumbled sentences.
Can anyone share any material or books which you practised with your child?
I am planning to buy firstpast the post cloze passage books but before purchasing would like to know how you all practised.

This is a CEM question.

Look in the CEM section and you will see there is already a thread on this. DG

My DS also found shuffled sentences (where you have to identify the word that doesn't fit) very tricky at first. However, it's possibly the question type he improved most on through practice. Strategies we found useful were:
1. Scan the words quickly to see if you can work out the general subject of the sentence/what it's about.
2. Look out for any 'rogue' vocabulary items, i.e. words that don't seem to fit in the context, such as 'supermarket' in a sentence about nature.
3. Look for the verb and then try to find its subject (who is doing the action). This could well be a person but could also be a pronoun (he/she/it...).
4. Identify any pairs of words that could go together, e.g. 'sunny' and 'morning', 'walking' and 'slowly'.
5. Look out for any 'rogue' grammar items, e.g. 'that' where the only noun is plural (e.g. 'shoes') or 'an' where there isn't a noun beginning with a vowel.
6. Be careful with words with more than one meaning. We came across a sentence with the word 'crisp'. It also included the word 'packet' but this one turned out to be the superfluous word since the rest of the sentence was about a cold winter's morning!
7. If you're still stuck, look out for words like 'if' or 'when' which could start the sentence.
8. Sometimes these sentences seem to be testing more 'advanced' grammar, e.g. the passive – 'The musicians were applauded by the audience' – so look out for constructions like this.
DS began by trying to write the correct sentence out each time, but soon realised it would be quicker to put numbers over the words to indicate the possible order.

I am afraid that there is no 'quick fix' for cloze.

I've found that ultimately a well read child who has read a rich variety of good quality books and non-fiction material, will do well with cloze - far better than a child who has spent two years practising paper after paper but has not been reading.

As well as reading, vocabulary and general English knowledge is built through family conversation, and listening to good quality programs on the radio and TV, and listening to audio books.

I must admit that my ds2 was a bit of an exception. The stubborn boy has never read much fiction - but does read non fiction science/technology magazines.
Yet he was surprisingly good at cloze and I believe this is because he is hearing-impaired. As he was used to only ever hearing about 70% at most of a conversation, and 'filling in the blanks' in his mind, cloze may have come more naturally to him.
If a child can hear well, I am afraid they need to start reading !