11 Plus Exams Forum

my DS has his exam in January. Please, how would you recommend spending the last 2 weeks in preparation - just doing papers/ reading with him? Revision cards?
Also, as regards the writing task, there are different genres in writing: recount, story, persuasive article - would it be useful to create revision cards with each style of writing and its features?
Thank you.

Which exam is it and for which school?

What is a 'recount' ?

Are you making the revision cards yourself? and if so, are you confident that you know enough about each written form to be able to summarise accurately? IMO there is no substitute for practice tasks and getting your dc to write a good variety of tasks. I don't really think flashcards have any innate value WRT tasks like this.

Colet Court. Thank you for your reply. thought about creating spidergrams for each genre of writing ( story, recount, article etc)...but I can see your point that practise is better...
We study about 2 hours a day and then I am just trying to vary the ways we study

piggys wrote: What is a 'recount' ?

Courtesy of the BBC Bitesize website:

How to write a recount

▪ Write your recount in the first person because it happened to you! Eg "I felt excited."

▪ Use the past tense because it has already happened. Eg "It was the biggest fish I had ever seen!"

▪ Recounts are written in the order in which they happened. This is called chronological order.

▪ Use adverbs such as: firstly, next, then and finally.Using descriptive words will make it seem like your reader is there with you. Eg "The fish was shiny and slippery." Focus on the most exciting parts.

Our primary school did these regularly and always after trips, local visits (library, beach etc) and so on.

In fact, given how looked down on locally our primary school tended to be (may still be, for all I know), our DC seem to have done so much more there in terms of 'writing' than a lot of the DC whose parents post on here, so perhaps it wasn't so awful, after all.