11 Plus Exams Forum

What would you recommend as good textbooks for during the course and revision materials for the end for both lang and lit?

And for individual texts what books etc would you recommend for getting to grips with them during the course e.g. a Jane Austen novel, a Shakespeare play, An Inspector Calls and the Romance and Love poetry.

I think piggys is probably the best person to answer this question, so I apologise in advance if the information I’m about to give you isn’t the best.

I’m not sure about textbooks as such, but we did buy some 9-1 revision booklets for both Lang. and Lit., some of which were recommended by the school. She has also watched Mr Bruff (AQA) and Miss Whelan videos online. For language, she has the Mr Bruff guide. I’ve also bought these adorable little revision cards for lit. - a colleague ordered them for me - which are just beautiful to look at, if nothing else. They give a sample question for various exam boards, but the sample answer given is for the AQA question. Are they good? I don’t know. And I don’t think DD has looked at them properly yet. But they are very cute. There are so many videos online and I suppose you could have a look at some of them yourself.

Has your daughter started her GCSE course yet? I’m sure there’ll be more materials available soon. And what about her school? Have they recommended anything at all?

Our school recommended a lot of revision aids which could be bought through the school. Mostly they remained unopened.

Thank you KS10 and Scary Mum. Mr Bruff videos etc -- thank you! Never come across him before and it could be just the ticket.

Cute cards sound good too --- depending on the source of the cuteness. Do you know which they are?

For revision purposes school suggests CGP "Complete Revision and Practice".

mystery wrote:Thank you KS10 and Scary Mum. Mr Bruff videos etc -- thank you! Never come across him before and it could be just the ticket.

Cute cards sound good too --- depending on the source of the cuteness. Do you know which they are?

For revision purposes school suggests CGP "Complete Revision and Practice".

If that's what the school suggests, I would at least start with a look at those? If your DC likes the look of them (personally, I find the CGP format a bit annoying, but ours don't seem to mind it, so we do buy the ones they ask for ), does the school offer them at a discount?

Mystery (Kindly... ) why do you think you need to be looking for materials for your daughter, who is still some way off doing her GCSE? I may be an extreme example but my son did both new English papers last summer and got 9 on both. I did not do anything at all to assist in that other than say 'yes' when in April (before exam in May) he asked to use my card to buy a book of some kind off a well known website. Even with no materials like past papers etc all of the schools round here managed to get a spread of grades that they would have expected from their cohorts. I think your daughter is at a highly selective school and I imagine that they will have all this in hand by the time her turn comes. It may be that in trying to give your daughter an advantage by buying things early and getting her started, you end up disadvantaging her by either putting her off/making her stale or, most importantly, pre-emtping and thereby devaluing the things the teachers will be doing nearer the time.

As I say, kindly meant, but maybe just step back a little x

+1....

DS1 in the same cohort as Amber's...same result, and English was not a subject we bought any kind of additional revision stuff off the internet for (I think we bought one History text book, because they shared them in class, a Latin book that was recommended at the beginning of the GCSE course and that was it.)

I wouldn't go overboard with revision materials - there are so many out there and they are all a bit incidental to actually having a thorough understanding of the text. The best way your dc can prepare is reading! there is nothing to stop you getting the old black and white film version (by far the best) of An Inspector Calls, and as for Shakespeare....there is a huge world out there dedicated to him!

Thanks Piggys - just nearly crossed and others who have answered.

Yes, the CGP layout is visually annoying but the content, hopefully, is well matched to the course content in general - although I don't think any of their books are exam board approved to the new 9-1 syllabuses are they, in any subject?

It's really helpful to know if people do have any up to date recommendations that fit well with the new 9-1s (e.g. English last year was the first year it was taken) and then a student can, of course, choose whichever looks better to them when and if they need it.

Hopefully, some suggestions of materials which may prove useful at some point wouldn't make a teenager feel that either they or school were lacking in some way any more than a school selling revision guides might suggest that they hadn't taught the material --- which it doesn't mean. They just can be very handy and a lot of students use them these days from quite young. I didn't, but our now adult children did to great effect and I've done volunteer tutoring with ones that do too.

If I'd thought to buy one myself as a teenager, there's one subject I could have done much better in which in some ways I always have had regrets about. Instead, I just kind of "shelved" that subject. Learning to choose materials that will help one's studies is a useful skill in itself and sooner is better than later.

There's definitely a huge industry around writing and publishing revision guides and a lot must be purchased and sit unused on shelves as students do not have time to make use of them. The massive rise in this industry is maybe partly a corollary of the death of one text book per student at school as well as frequent syllabus change.

ps well done to the sons with 9s Amber and KCG in the new papers last summer

Thanks to National Theatre Live,Macbeth is broadcast live to cinemas this Thursday:

http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/pr ... 75-macbeth" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It seems very modern though, maybe not to everyone's taste!