11 Plus Exams Forum

Please help
my dd cannot get this type at all.
She goes completely blank with this type
Any ideas please share.
this type lets her score down drastically....
Thanks

Hi, my DD too.

I think I've isolated it to how my DD approaches spelling and have tried to improve her spelling using Schonell and some ae books and it seems to be working. She has a very good range of vocabulary and is praised for her literacy work at school but seems to be another one of those whose spelling errors are allowed to slide.

I agree. This is really impossible for my DS. Spelling has always been impossible for him as he has very poor visual memory so he simply doesn't notice if things look wrong.

I would love to find a million examples of this type and just keep practising them.

If anyone can help with ideas, please do pitch them in....

Thanks - toolate

There are some games you could play, to help, going about it from another angle.

Write down some three letter words eg
RAT
MAT
SAT
CAN
TIN
RAM
ANT

then see if she can add a letter to any of them to make a new real word. Give her a choc button or penny for each one she can do.

Do some with her, or suggest adding an 'e' to the end or somewhere in the middle. So, allow mate or meat, sate or seat etc. Then suggest adding a consonant to the front or in the middle. Take one word and see how many new words you can get from it. Build it up until she is adding several letters either side of the short word, and see if she then finds it easier to imagine which word is missing.

Another game is alligator. You write a long-ish word (eg alligator) and take it in turns to write a new word, which must start with the last three letters of the previous word. You write them in a long snake.
Eg:
Alligator
tornado
adornment
entertainer
neroli
oligarch

The last word wins (unless someone can come up with a word that begins rch!) Your job as the fellow player is to supply words with endings that can be made into new ones. My mum used to play this with me for hours. I loved it.

This was the one question type which let my DD down last year, on the practice papers she would get virtually full marks on all the others but just could not grasp this one. We just did more and more practice and in the end I knew on the day she could get every one right or not answer one and resigned myself to that, in the knowledge that she was strong on all the other types. In the end she missed 3 of these out and scored really high on VR. What I'm trying to say is, do all you can to improve weak areas, but if it comes down to one question type, don't worry........

There is a good card game called boggle slam! It is designed to be played using 4 letter words - you compete to replace letters one at a time to make new words, but you could use it with different word lengths.

Yes, my tutored children find this one quite difficult and if their spelling isn't up to scratch it can cause even more problems.

Example: Today we visited the CAAL

First strategy: Sentence should be a clue to the 'whole' word [ although in this instance not much of a clue]

Clue: somewhere we might visit.

Second strategy: Space the letters out with enough room to fit the 3 letter words given on the answer sheet.....

C --- A --- A --- L

Then start trying the words in each of the spaces.....the answer is pit the child would try pit

pitCAAL

CpitAA L

CApitA L found the word capital!!!

This involves speed writing, I tell all my students for once they DO NOT have to write neatly!!!! As long as they can read it, it doesn't matter what it looks like.

Some children only need to space out the letters and then visualize the word in between the letters others need to write it down.

In addition Look for letters that often go together like ING and ABLE, missing 3 letter word will more than likely fit just before these letters.

Look for letters that do not go together, WHVER as HV do not go together the word from the answer sheet will go between these letters.

Patricia

Its at times like this that I wish Kendrick was MC so there would be a set of words to choose - this is so much harder when there are no clues

Thanks for all those tips - that's really helpful....

Now if anyone has any bright ideas about DS' other total nightmare - moving a letter from one word to the other to make two new words. The official technique of trying every option takes way too long - I don't think he will have that kind of spare time in the test.....

Thanks all for the brilliant ideas.
I am working hard on spellings and letter strings within each word but when it comes to using Multiple choice format for standard, their is no clue as many a times just a phrase appears.
I am struggling to find practice sheets for just this type.
Any suggestions.
Thanks a lot.