trust my own instincts?

[anotherkentmum]

All i can say is thank heavens for this site! Without it the whole experience would be rather stressful, which is not how i want it to be!

[Kent Mum]

Hi there!
Just catching up on the posts- and I thought I'd add my encouragement to you to put your son in for the tests! I live pretty close to your area (just down the road!) and I certainly know the choice of schools you have (same as ours). I wouldn't hesitate to encourage him to try his best. We did our first practise paper in the first term of year 6 (Very late compared to some!!!) and, although my son's a very clever lad, he scored pretty dismally on his first few. It wasn't lack of ability- but lack of familiarity with the format and timing- Oh the dreaded timing!!!!! With some strategies that we worked out together and a bit of practise, he was doing well by Christmas. Now, he's off to MGS in September and is really looking forward to it!
Don't be put off by a 'lower' score. My son has always scored highly in SATS but needed help with his timing. Practise let his true potential show through- and I'm sure it will be the same for your son, too. You sound as if you've got a really good attitude to it all and will help him rise to the challenge.

[Guest]

Hi Kent Mum

My son will be taking the 11+ (in a different area to you) and although he is doing quite well with the scores (most of the time!), he does struggle with his timing. Please could you tell me how you overcame this?

Thank you.

[Kent Mum]

Alot of it was simply a case of familiarising himself with the format and style of questions- and getting to understand what was meant by certain wording- that sort of thing. For my son, the most useful time saving tips we worked out were lots of little strategies that just cut corners. For example, where there is a sentence in which he had to find a word of four letters, he simply put a thumb each side of the first four letters, then moved his thumbs along a letter at a time- which meant that the word was easy to spot and cut out that 'I can't see it!' panic. For the codes, he wrote letters over the top of the rows- that sort of thing. I found he was trying to work alot out in his head- which he's very capable of doing (a heck of alot faster than me!!!) but under the time pressure, he was getting himself in a muddle and needing to check his answers twice. I told him to forget that way and scrawl everything down on the test sheet. write numbers down as you go, underline things, write things down in a different order- whatever helped. He was also taking too long on the first block of questions everytime on Maths. They spend years learning how to be thorough and keep at it till they can get to the answer- but the poor lad had to throw that aside just for the 11+ to some extent! I told him that if he couldn't get the answer very quickly- just forget it and move on to the next one- as he could always come back to it. He found that as his speed picked up, and the level of panic decreased, he was able to go back more and more and eventually wasn't leaving out many at all in the first place. He left out 4 in the actual test in the end. Sounds so basic- but they can really struggle with doing that! That first section is such a psychological block- if they panic and can't do the first few, it can dent their confidence ("I can't even do these ones- I'll never do it!") but he learnt in the end not to see th efirst few questions as an indication of how the whole thing would go.
He never had problems with NVR- he's very strong at that (the only paper he ever consistently finished in the time limit). We had a few mini- challenges between us. We were lucky to be given a whole load of practise papers by a friend who had bought the wrong ones for her son a couple of years back. The format wasn't the one we were using, so instead of doing the actula tests, we picked out individual questions and had 'races' to see who could get to the answer first. It was a fun way of picking up the speed and that competitive element focused him.
It sounds as though we practised all the time- but we didn't . It never became a major thing and we were careful to keep the pressure off him.
Good grief- I've waffled on!!!!
Anyhow- hope some of that helps. I'll have a look at some of the left over papers & if anything useful springs to mind- I'll pop on here somewhere.
Good luck!

[Guest]

Thank you very much Kent Mum for your very detailed reply, some of the tips you suggest we already use, some we don't but will certainly put them into practse.

Thanks so much for being to helpful.