Hello everyone

11+ first timer here (also DIY)

We are starting with practice test at home now for the Kent 11+ and are not sure how to use the materials available on the market to mimic the testing conditions of the real test. The main problem is timing. Most materials including those from GL Assessment have 50 minute tests. Only a new product from CGP titled Kent Practice tests have 25 minute tests.

The Kent test is made up of shorter tests of 25 minutes each. We don't have time to sit 50 minute tests either. And the questions in the tests increase in difficulty so we can't split the 50 minute tests into two sittings. One idea is to sit the odd number question in one sitting then even number question in another. But then it's quite distracting to see other questions on the papers.

Anyone has any idea? We will book mock tests later but want to try at home first.

Thanks

Letts and Bond do ten minute tests. DD did a few of these each week plus areas the mocks highlighted.

We didn’t focus on trying to replicate the exact version of the test for a few reasons. Firstly DD was sitting Kent, Newstead and Bexley - also we wanted her to focus on the test in hand and not some idea of what it should be and get thrown if it had changed. I’ve heard of children sitting with hands up in tests wasting five minutes because they are confused it is different from what they practised for.

Good luck

thanks for this

We found 10 minute tests are too short and don't help prepare the child for the level of concentration/ required for the real tests. We are also considering different tests and have solely focused on the knowledge so far, have not done any timed tests yet apart from occasional 10 minute papers. So to move from learning and practising to testing is a new challenge, as is everything so far for a first timer/DIYer.

How do we learn about testing techniques such as timing/keep moving and coming back to difficult ones/checking etc at home?

We did a bit of the odd/even thing. On one hand it's distracting, but on the other it really gets them to practise concentrating on writing the answers in the right places, ie checking you're putting the answer to question no. 57 in box no. 57. And then they can still go back and check answers etc, and leave questions to come back to if they're too hard. I agree though, it is annoying that there aren't any practice papers the same length as the Kent Test.

Every child is different but don’t get focused on constant testing, for my DD it would have been counter productive. She spent small amounts of time focusing on areas she wasn’t getting right which weren’t too many but meant we were not going over and over the same things. She found the ten minute tests fine and then just extrapolated the methods to a longer test once in a while. If we had been going over and over she would have switched off. The GL papers sold on this site are fairly similar (minus the spatial) to the Kent teat or they were when DD did it a few years ago.

For Kent and Bexley it is very time pressured so a method to mark unfinished questions is a good skill to have. Just agree one and go for it. The mocks showed DD that she was sometimes marking the box diagonally and so the reader didn’t pick up that she had marked it so she got more accurate at that. Also rubbing out is a bad and time wasting habit.

For test technique it was a combination of mock tests (2) and a few full papers as well as extrapolating from the shower tests.

Keep up the fun stuff like reading widely, being the banker in monopoly etc.

I have 4 children, all got admissions to grammars.
We only did GL papers going through each question with explanation.
As you go along, you identify weak areas and work on those separately, so that if a similar question comes again, your child would know how to solve it and have sufficient knowledge about the topic.
This proved to be the right approach for my children.

Forgot to mention that initially we did not do the tests under timed conditions in order to identify weak areas, but closer to exams we practised strictly timed.
And we used CGP books just for reference to learn about specific topics for example in Maths.