11 Plus Exams Forum

Hi,
I was wondering if any of the CRGS mothers could help? When we went to the open evening at CRGS, we saw a maths book that the Year 7 boys said they all use. I have been racking my brains but cannot remember the name of the book. At my son's primary school, they are working through stuff that my son did a year back. He is quite rapidly getting bored with the work, so I thought this book might stimulate and challenge him. Basically get him out of the clutches of Minecraft!

It used to be Essential maths 7H but this was on the old national curriculum. It may well change for next year, as ours are the first year of the new national circulum to hit secondary school.

Thank you. That is the book that we saw. Is there any other book which could be suitable? My son gets one piece of maths and one of English work every week, which he finishes in less than 5 minutes and is not getting stretched. The school is not happy to give extra work or harder work as they are following the national curriculum and are not willing to do anything extra. It is very frustrating, I just want him to do some quality work and keep up and improve his present knowledge, and not completely slack off.

I would avoid pushing ahead significantly in the NC as it sounds like he might then get bored at the start of year 7.
There are lots of resources on the internet - search on 'maths challenge' as a start maybe.
Getting him to use his maths brain in a different way will be more fun as well as preparing him for later extension work.
Remind him that in NC there are sometimes set ways of doing things to get the marks but in problem solving you can use which ever method you like.

You could download some Junior Maths Challenge papers from the UKMT website and get him to have a look at those. Of course, his next school night do the same, but I don't think that should really matter.

CRGS have indeed done these in the past.
I don't know if its still the case but at one point my DC did some ( many years ago so not sure if it was UKMT)where they were penalised for getting incorrect answers ( as opposed to not attempting the question).
If it is then I would suggest not using them in that particular way for your purpose.

Another option would be to look at some science problems.

Start taking The Times and let him loose on the Mind Games section and the Suko puzzle in the main bit? Lots of practice with arithmetic and logic in the various puzzles, plus vocab in Codeword.

(I'm going to start charging the newspaper an advertising fee at this rate ).

Thank you all. The Times suggestion is good, maybe that is the way forward.

Having similar challenge as my DS doesn't seems to be much interested in doing extra Maths/English post exams.

I bought him a starter kit of Raspberry Pi from Amazon and he is slowly getting interested there. Just last weekend we even did a small program to display all prime numbers from 1-1000 and he was excited to see how quickly you can get results. He managed to find games there as well though but its keeping him busy for now

If they have younger siblings then making up puzzles, crosswords ( or numbers) can be fun and being able to 'work backwards' can be another way of applying understanding.