S&S Mental Arithmetic 5 and 6

[mystery]

For the syllabus topics that might be covered in Kent I can see no other way than reading through all 8 maths familiarisation papers published by GL assessment and writing down all the topics you think your child still needs to cover.

[parent2013]

Fatbananas...I thought you were in Kent? Are you trying to get your dc into superselective, or normal grammar? No point in scaring dc or yourself with book 5 just yet, after all they have not even completed year 5 curriculum, so things like ratios, percentages, proportion, in my ds' s school are studied this coming term, he only learnt multiplying and dividing decimals last half term, which features a lot in book 4.
I think kcg' s primary school is exceptional in their use of these books to a high level, and her boys are v v clever! Square roots are done to a minimum in year 5 and 6, my ds who is at grammar, had to decorate the inside of his maths book with square roots at the beginning of year 7, and areas of circles are generally year 7 and 8!
One thing I have been using from the books, is the terminology, there was a chat in a thread about this somewhere before. Awkward questions use: sum,product, total, derived, difference, etc which are a swine to learn...to be honest, they throw a lot of adults too, so it is worth using the c questions to get dc used to the variations that may be thrown at them.

Happy days.

Yes, I am in Kent and there are superselectives and ordinary grammars around here. At the moment, I just want DS to pass but equally I want him to do the best he can. I was just interested why people used the higher level S&S if the content for GS exams was not supposed to touch anything beyond KS2. When I read about books 5&6 being used it alarmed me!!

Thanks to everyone who has replied. It's been really helpful. The stuff about imperial measurements has been bothering me, so thanks too for that discussion.

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!! I know I shouldn't wish my life away, but I'm quite looking forward to next Christmas and New Year, when, hopefully, outcomes will be clearer

GL is the closest to the real exam in Kent but the actual exam is difficult. Having said that, the pattern is changing this year so it is bit of unknown. We did not do S&S so don't know how good or bad it is. My favourites are - Bond, GL & FPTP followed by private papers. We stick to understanding the core principles and then the format of the exam did not matter much.

For imperial, one should be comfortable with conversions but there is no real need to cram them stones into ounces. I remember seeing a question in super-selective where a question with different units (pressure hg/mbar) was given to confuse children who are mostly used to the metric.

Hope that helps.