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Verbal resoning

Posted: Tue Jun 29, 2010 12:26 pm
by stresshead
Hi

My son sits the slough consortium and bucks 11 plus in september 2010. at present he does a full verbal reasoning paper 100 questions, however in 50 minutes he only does 48 questions, can someone please give me some advice on how i can get him to speed up.

Also up to now we have not done any vocabulary and tips where to start

Thanks

Re: Verbal resoning

Posted: Tue Jun 29, 2010 10:10 pm
by Chilled
I'm presuming that you have been through the question types with him and he knows what he is supposed to do for each one, now it is just practise.

Does he work through the questions as they come or does he do the ones he finds easiest first? I always told my son to leave the type he found hardest until last. Don't spend too much time on each question, if he doesn't get it quite quickly then move on. You can always come back to it.

Once I photocopied the paper and we competed against each other. If he beat my score he got a small prize. It didn't matter if I was quicker than him but he was only allowed the standard time. This was an attempt to focus his mind a bit more so that he read the questions properly and didn't make silly mistakes. We drew, I didn't read the question properly and made a silly mistake!

As far as vocab. goes probably the best way of widening his vocabulary is reading or making up stories. You can read to him if he isn't interested in reading much by himself. Puzzle books with crosswords, wordsearch, etc are a fun way to play with words as well. We also played word games such as think of words that sound the same but have different meanings, e.g. pear, pair and pare and to explain the meanings. These are all things that we have done over the years for fun rather than exam-focused so they never seemed like work.

Good luck with it all.

Re: Verbal resoning

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 7:15 am
by patricia

Re: Verbal resoning

Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2010 11:51 am
by stresshead
the first exam is 30 september for bucks so have about 10 weeks we did a verbal NFER paper yesterday and in 50 minutes he managed to do 42 questions and got 35 right, do you think he can still speed up in time i am seriously worried