Hi all,

We are moving into Year 5 next academic year so I am stepping up my getting prepared and as such I have a couple of questions.

1) I hear folks say they have done 100s of practice exams. Is this right and if so where do you get them from? Are the Bond books (and others) sufficient to meet this amount?

2) Is there a resource where I can get a baseline test at the end of Y4/start of Y5 that will give guidance as to where to concentrate etc?

As allows, thanks in advance.

OED

I think it very much varies according to where you live. Would you like me to move this to a particular area?
I don't believe anyone does hundreds of practice exams. Do you mean practice papers at home? Only the most obsessive would do that and it shouldn't be necessary wherever you live.

Yeah scary, I meant papers.

The best thing you could do at this stage is really hone mental maths esp the 4 operations and bonds to 10. Quick recall will cut down the tine spent on each question
Build vocabulary, play scrabble (allow your child to use a dictionary and get them to tell you the definition of any strange words) Boggle is a brilliant game for recognising letter patterns. Word searches are great to, once you get into them certain groups of letters stand out


Jigsaws and online games like Tetris, Mah Jong and match 3 types are good for pattern recognition/shape orientation.
All the skills built doing this type of activity will greatly help with learning in general

Check what test your DC is sitting.
Some books are specific to a test, example GL or CEM.
And some schools don't sit some papers, example they might do Maths, Verbal Reasoning and Non Verbal Reasoning but not English.
I prefer CGP to Bond, I think they're better organised for CEM and GL tests. Each paper in the book could be used as an assessment paper if wanted.

While testing at this stage is not necessary, preparation for the eventual 11+ is a really good idea. CGP have a really good range ( for you it would be 8-9 moving on to 10 -11) Schofield and Sims is also very good ( Mental Arithmetic - start with Book 2, and for SPAG, English Skills. They also have a range of Comprehension books. In fact, it is far better to start with these for reading skills in year 4 as multiple choice is only needed in year 5 - if indeed that is what is required in your area. For vocabulary, there are lots dedicated to this on the market. My favourite is Synonyms and Antonyms by Christine Draper.

We did not do 1000s of practice papers - I think I bought 2 “proper sets” - each of which has 2 papers in, so 4 in total. I also paid for ds to do a proper mock exam at a local tuition providing centre - purely to get the experience of doing the test, rather than because of the test content.

We did a practice paper only every 2-3 weeks; I think any child who did them more often than this would get fed up of sitting down for 2 hours each time so regularly...and then if they’re annoyed by it, it then becomes counter-productive. This obviously wasn’t all we did - we just did much more manageable chunks of questions, revision etc in smaller bites so that ds (or me!) didn’t get disillusioned with it all.

Thanks all

DD did a couple of mocks and about four practice papers at home. We spent an hour a week tops focusing on area of weakness and not regurgitation of the same tests and same content.

Helpful with technique, familiarisation and identifying any gaps were the 10 minute tests. DD did about three a week plus reviewing each one and some questions I created that focused on her weak areas.

DD was aiming for a superselective amd she did have friends doing four times as much work. Some succeeded, some didn’t. I think you need to be targeted and use time wisely. DD passed all her tests, but some who spent lots more time didn’t so it isn’t about how much time you put in but your DC’s starting point, motivation and effectiveness of any familiarisation.

As mentioned by YoYo in the earlier years games like scrabble and ‘maths in action’ (how much does it cost to print a colour page from our printer) are helpful whether they make it to grammar or not.

We only started using test papers from june onwards, (sat exams in Oct) the papers are quite intense and unless the children have learnt the material it can be quite disheartening if they score low or simply don’t know the work.

When we did do the tests I did a copy alongside Ds. It made it less intense for him and made me appreciate how much work was involved.

We found reading and expanding his vocabulary and understanding really made a difference and made him more confident in his own abilities