Hi Can any one tell me if their child is finding the IPS verbal questions more difficult than other publishers? My son has done several athey verbal papers with good results but finding the IPS ones more challenging. I also have some letts/gl papers for nearer the test.
My son is experiencing self doubt at the moment, he does very well academically at school and school think he would cope very well at grammar school.Recently a child commented out loud to another child when they were doing end of year tests, that it would be funny if he didn't do well for a change. An innocent comment that has affected him because he thinks people are waiting for him to fail. Not what he needs when practising for the 11+. Thanks for taking the time to read this

Hi you don't say how old you'd DS is or when he is to sit the test? We found IPS harder than athey. If my recollection is right athey are easier but have more questions. My DS always struggled when we changed publisher. GL and letts are harder with bright sparks and Walsh at the top end. Have a look at patricia's post in the bucks section on VR. What helped my DS was looking at where he was stuggling. Some bits he did very well but others such as codes would take him ages, so we spent time using a how to do VR book (ae) going over them until he was confident. I also got him to learn to guess and he realised he was right 9 times out of 10. We made sure he was confident on the ones he could do well and aimed for 80 -90% on the ones he wasn't. Hope this helps and good luck. I think with VR it is practice which will help most, unlike NVR it is much easier to learn.

Hi Copella thanks for your reply,My son is in y5 and takes the 11+ in september. After reading your reply I told him that other people find the Ips questions harder too,which seemed to make him feel happier about continuing with them .

Hi I am pleased I was able to help. Each paper is different which is why it is helpful to do lots of different types so that they are used to different sorts of questions by the time they sit the test.Not sure where you are as it would be useful to find out who sets the paper or what styles are used and concentrate on these nearer the time ie in my area it was nfer and moray house which are the equivalent of gl assessment and athey. Athey are very wordy and different to ips so he may just be struggling with the different way questions are phrased.

I must say give or take a few niggles my DS scored highly on VR but the times he did badly it was really on a particular type so see where he struggles and try and help him with this. Best of luck

Which papers best reflect the real 11plus in your area, or is there no way of knowing this? Around us in Kent it's the GL Assessment papers as they set the real test papers.

I haven't prepared for the 11plus so this might not be good advice, but if it were my child I might change the "study plan" at the moment to working on different question types, rather than doing whole papers. Or if you do stick with doing whole papers, make it a "scientific job" of working out at the end what you have learned about "next steps" from it. e.g. you tackled all the questions so speed is great, but you got 50% right so next time we will concentrate on accuracy rather than speed. Then break the results down into question type and see how he performed on the different question types and use that to inform next steps. Look at all the questions he got wrong and see if he could have done them given endless time and patience, or does he need more teaching about the type, or some vocab development, or more training in giving up on a difficult question, guessing and moving on etc etc.

I would think it was important to take the focus off purely comparing the score at the end of every practice paper. It's a flawed method as some papers will be harder than others, even from the same publisher.

Thank you for the advice, I have since found out that the Athey are fine for verbal in Lincs but not so for the non verbal. We are continuing with the ips and the letts/gl/nfer. He is getting better at not being phased by differing formats.He did a practise/mock paper at school sent by the grammar school last week and he said it was most like the letts/gl type especially the non verbal.We will continue with papers throughout the summer,I have told him that if he can't do a question just keep calm and move on and not to panic as that will prevent him from answering other questions that he might have otherwise got correct. Thanks again for taking the time to reply, the advice and support is really appreciated.

I think the calmness is key.

In my DD's mock, she focused too much on one question in NVR and then ran out of time in last section. The discipline to move on the next question needs to develop as they are not used to this.
We are in Lincs too.

My daughter finds IPS harder than any other paper.
She has attempted most of the publishers and IPS is too tough and tends to take more time than any other.
I really don't have any clue why this happens, the 1st look at these papers terrifies her.
the only key to me is to calm down as she is giving this october

Thankyou everyone