Year 5 Prep

[Jolem2000]

Having been through the old style tests for my two DS i'm now faced with the new world of CEM tests for DD! I've been trying to gather as much info as I can from this forum to help with preparation. Looking at the practice materials available does anyone have an opinion on whether Bond or CGP is better to practice with?
I've noted that some have found CGP harder than the real test but not sure if this is an advantage?!
Any advice tips would be much appreciated, thank you!

[Tolstoy]

I am still awaiting results but I would suggest using a range of publishers. Also some years the test is harder than others so best not to rely too much on feedback from one year.

Gloucs appear to be using the same CEM as some other counties so I would head over to Birmingham if I were you. They have been doing it for a long time now and there is a wealth of knowledge there.

[steppemum]

Here is what I did.

I bought the CGP books for the 4 subjects (English, maths, VR and NVR)

We went through each book and made sure she could do everything.

So, for example, on the page referring to shape, I realised that she need to know lots of vocab (shape names eg pentagon and rhombus, acute angles, isosceles triangle) plus lots of shape facts (eg the angles inside a triangle add up to 180) She had done all of these at school, but didn't necessarily have the facts at her finger tips.

Then we used the books to practice them in real questions.

At the same time we did lots of vocab learning. I have old style VR books and I used lots of the questions from there, eg the synonym and antonym questions, we learnt the vocab she didn't know and it was good VR practice.

We also drilled times tables till she knew them including as division facts.

Then we did the practise tests in the book under test conditions, we used out local library, as she found home wasn't test like enough! This helped her to learn the test skills, like always putting an answer, if you get stuck, move on, keeping an eye on the clock, so you don't run out of time for the ones at the end that you can do.

We found all the practice tests very very hard to do in the time. But we also worked at improving speed.

It worked, she is in the PAN for SHS.

[Tolstoy]

Interesting Steppemum using the library. I have always done it at home which can be very distracing with everything else going on. Found it particularly hard this time ironically as should have been easier without having younger DC to keep entertained.

[steppemum]

We do have a good relationship with our library, and they have an upstairs room which they sometimes let out to groups. They said we could use the room anytime it was free, and there was a landing space outside the room which had a couple of tables. One time when the pilates group were busy upstairs we used the landing which was also fine.

[Jolem2000]

Thanks Steppemum that's really useful! So glad you got the result you wanted too.