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Improving VR skills

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 10:25 am
by poppy
Hi, I am currently helping my daughter (end yr 5) to improve her maths skills and I find this fairly straightforward and rewarding! It is having a brilliant impact on her confidence. I am reasonably familiar with the Key Stage 2 national curriculum for maths and the requirements for 11+ and I find that patience and clear explanation is the key and she starts to grasp it all.

What I find difficult is to find a logical way to improve cetain aspects of VR. Familiarisation with question style is a start and logical approaches to 'sequences' seems fairly straightforward. But, how do I actively develop her vocabulary (which is average at the moment). She is not a keen reader, but I do try to get her to read to me for 10 minutes every other day. Is there anything else I can do?

Thanks

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 1:49 pm
by Y
Do you read to her? Most children like to be read to, and it's an opportunity to introduce her to material which would be too difficult for her to read by herself. Take time to discuss the vocabulary, and look up any doubtful words. Make a note of them, and their meanings, and you could play matching games with groups of about 10 words and meanings to ensure that she remembers the new words. (Old business cards are useful for these games). You could also play hangman with the words. Hangman can be a good way to get your child to think about spelling patterns. (You know the sort of thing; you've got *****ion, what letter could go in the last * position?)

Though it will do nothing for your child's ability to find her way round the alphabet, a good electronic dictionary is much more fun than the paper version, and because it's quick to use, you don't interrupt the narrative for too long. Most reluctant dictionary users are willing to use one, and if you get one which solves anagrams and crossword clues, they can be invaluable if your school sets that sort of homework.... Some also contain word games.

Certain of the hand-held consoles have some useful games (If she has one, PM me, and I'll send you a suggestion. I think if I post anything here it will be counted as advertising).

Search out books of children's crosswords, which again will be useful for vocabulary and spelling. (You may need the web for this; when I looked in the shops once, I couldn't find anything). There are also a lot of vocabulary resources on the web (search for 'word puzzles'), though many of them are American. You'll also find resources that will let you create your own crosswords, word searches, anagrams and quizzes.

Hope some of this is useful.

Y

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 2:54 pm
by GemmaB
if you look in the tips section there are ones for VR, i.e. compound words, games I have also googled compound word games and found some good ideas
My daughter is much happier to be presented with work as games However saying that we had a period of 3 months or so where we had "word cards" and any unknown words we wrote down on 1 side of a card and the meaning, synonym and antonym on the other and we went through them most nights Very dry stuff, but her vocab increased noticeably.

Good Luck

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 4:24 pm
by yoyo123
Most of what i was going to suggest has already been said.

If she is a reluctant reader, what about talking books. I have used them with pupils who do not have an age appropriate reading abillity, but needed to be exposed to something other than basic stories.

A good way to introduce her to different genres of writing and she may want to read other stories in teh series for herself.

A pretty notebook to write down unfamiliar words is good to, you can look them up together. Scrabble is a good way to extend vocabulary especially if you allow contestants to use the dictionary, it is amazing the words you find when you are looking for a good score with your letters.

Practice, practoce and more practice seems to help with VR. Have you used the IPS books?

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:58 pm
by Mike
Hi

With regard to the vocabulary element of the 11+ verbal reasoning questions. The Tutors were approached by elevenplusexams with the suggestion that due to the amount of interest in this area that a CD that would help to develop vocabulary may prove to be popular.

We are currently undergoing the proof-reading stages for the CD and the launch should be advertised shortly.

The CD will consist of 9 types of questions with 5 papers consisting of 25 questions each, that is 1125 questions. They will be of a similar format to the existing CDs in that they are multiple-choice, self-marking and can be completed as often as necessary with the last 10 results for any paper being recorded.

The question types are as follows:

Similar Meaning
Opposite Meaning
Spelling Errors
Word in a Word
Compound Words
Anagram Pairs
Synonym Sets
Alphabet Order
Opposite Pairs

There will be over 12,000 words in the question set and of these there will be over 10,000 unique words altogether.

More information will be made available shortly and a free Demo for the CD will be online for people to review.

Regards

Mike

Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 7:53 pm
by yoyo123
excellent!

I have a pupil who had a real block with alphabetical order, I have exhausted most of my repetoire!

I look forward to it

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 12:33 pm
by Mike
Hi yoyo123

The Alphabet Order set of questions start off with 5 five-letter words all starting with the same letter in multiple-choice format.
There is one correct answer.
All the words in each question are different, so you can adapt an exercise to use the four incorrect answers and ask the student to put them in alphabet order.

Regards

Mike

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 3:39 pm
by Poppy
Brilliant advice and suggestions everyone. Now off to purchase Scrabble, electronic dictionary etc. Also, we have agreed to start reading Harry Potter to her each day and will record any unfamiliar words, so that we can explore them :-)

Many thanks

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 6:00 pm
by Sally-Anne
Somehow I don't think "Expelliarmus" will come up in the test though, Poppy! :lol:

Sally-Anne

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:50 pm
by Guest
Poppy wrote:Brilliant advice and suggestions everyone. Now off to purchase Scrabble, electronic dictionary etc. Also, we have agreed to start reading Harry Potter to her each day and will record any unfamiliar words, so that we can explore them :-)

Many thanks
Check the internet before buying the dictionary. There's only a limited range available in the shops, and certain of the more expensive ones are heavily discounted from the usual internet sources...