Hi all,

Can anyone in the know please advise on the suitability of these Jacqueline Wilson books for 11 plus prep?

Eldest DD (Y4) is loving these at the minute so we are letting her fill her boots with them, but does anyone know these books, the vocab level they are and if they are "good" for CEM?

Thanks in advance
OED

These books do not contain the vocabulary required for 11 plus.

I would recommend:

The Railway Children, Wind in the Willows, Anne of Green Gables, the Jungle Book, White Fang, Call of the Wild, Goodnight Mr Tom, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, the real versions of What Katy did and Five Children and IT rather than the stolen ones Jackie Wilson made money of.

DG

Thanks!!

Read the books she loves.

A lot of the books commonly recommended for 11+ were written for our grandparents, not our kids. They don't interest 8, 9 & 10 year olds.

The only word we learned from railway children was 'boring'. It was a real painful slog to get through it.

Let her read books she enjoys, especially as she is keen to read.

I know plenty of children who have passed 11plus without reading the ”classics”, mine included.

She could try different genres as well as her favourites, perhaps as audio books.

The sheer enjoyment of reading is a great thing, don’t let her be put off

(P.S. Primary school teacher for 25years)

Thanks all, she is machine gunning through the series so there is no way I am going to stop it.

It is getting to the stage where we have to make her turn the light out at night.

Thanks again

I’m with the ‘let her read what she enjoys crowd here’. Reading is reading.

We had that too, had to tell her to stop reading at night. The more they enjoy it the more they do it. She’ll run out of JW books and want to move on to something else and there’s plenty there (many with excellent Vocab if that’s a thing).

DD didn’t read any of the classics then, wasn’t her thing and I never pushed it. But the love of reading meant that as she got older she started to embrace things like Pride and Prejudice etc and ended up doing A level English Lit. (If I’d pushed her to read certain types, she would have just resisted.)
It also meant we had to buy her a really big book case.

DD was a late starter to reading (possibly dyslexic, as I am too). Once she started to pick it up she started reading the Rainbow magic books. And devoured them. I hated them at the time, but didn’t say anything as I was just pleased she had finally got to grips with reading and I want her to enjoy what she read. I realise now that they were the start of her wanting to read for pleasure, and glad I didn’t dissuade her from reading them.

Whilst you may or may not think JW is the thing for your DD to be reading now, it’s probably doing much the same, kindling a love of reading that will expand and grow and encompass so much more.

Its not that I think JW is the wrong thing, I just don't know what the right thing is....Turns out lots of things are the right thing.

I like the idea of audiobooks too...do they get the same exposure to vocab listening as well as reading?