Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

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OverEagerDad
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Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2019 12:19 pm

Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by OverEagerDad »

Hi all,

Can anyone in the know please advise on the suitability of these Jacqueline Wilson books for 11 plus prep?

Eldest DD (Y4) is loving these at the minute so we are letting her fill her boots with them, but does anyone know these books, the vocab level they are and if they are "good" for CEM?

Thanks in advance
OED
Daogroupie
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Location: Herts

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by Daogroupie »

These books do not contain the vocabulary required for 11 plus.

I would recommend:

The Railway Children, Wind in the Willows, Anne of Green Gables, the Jungle Book, White Fang, Call of the Wild, Goodnight Mr Tom, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, the real versions of What Katy did and Five Children and IT rather than the stolen ones Jackie Wilson made money of.

DG
OverEagerDad
Posts: 88
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2019 12:19 pm

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by OverEagerDad »

Thanks!!
KaB£H1s3
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Location: Trafford

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by KaB£H1s3 »

OverEagerDad wrote:Hi all,

Can anyone in the know please advise on the suitability of these Jacqueline Wilson books for 11 plus prep?

Eldest DD (Y4) is loving these at the minute so we are letting her fill her boots with them, but does anyone know these books, the vocab level they are and if they are "good" for CEM?

Thanks in advance
OED
Read the books she loves.

A lot of the books commonly recommended for 11+ were written for our grandparents, not our kids. They don't interest 8, 9 & 10 year olds.

The only word we learned from railway children was 'boring'. It was a real painful slog to get through it.
yoyo123
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Location: East Kent

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by yoyo123 »

Let her read books she enjoys, especially as she is keen to read.

I know plenty of children who have passed 11plus without reading the ”classics”, mine included.

She could try different genres as well as her favourites, perhaps as audio books.

The sheer enjoyment of reading is a great thing, don’t let her be put off

(P.S. Primary school teacher for 25years)
OverEagerDad
Posts: 88
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2019 12:19 pm

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by OverEagerDad »

Thanks all, she is machine gunning through the series so there is no way I am going to stop it.

It is getting to the stage where we have to make her turn the light out at night.

Thanks again
Tinkers
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Location: Reading

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by Tinkers »

OverEagerDad wrote:Thanks all, she is machine gunning through the series so there is no way I am going to stop it.

It is getting to the stage where we have to make her turn the light out at night.

Thanks again
I’m with the ‘let her read what she enjoys crowd here’. Reading is reading.

We had that too, had to tell her to stop reading at night. The more they enjoy it the more they do it. She’ll run out of JW books and want to move on to something else and there’s plenty there (many with excellent Vocab if that’s a thing).

DD didn’t read any of the classics then, wasn’t her thing and I never pushed it. But the love of reading meant that as she got older she started to embrace things like Pride and Prejudice etc and ended up doing A level English Lit. (If I’d pushed her to read certain types, she would have just resisted.)
It also meant we had to buy her a really big book case.

DD was a late starter to reading (possibly dyslexic, as I am too). Once she started to pick it up she started reading the Rainbow magic books. And devoured them. I hated them at the time, but didn’t say anything as I was just pleased she had finally got to grips with reading and I want her to enjoy what she read. I realise now that they were the start of her wanting to read for pleasure, and glad I didn’t dissuade her from reading them.

Whilst you may or may not think JW is the thing for your DD to be reading now, it’s probably doing much the same, kindling a love of reading that will expand and grow and encompass so much more.
OverEagerDad
Posts: 88
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2019 12:19 pm

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by OverEagerDad »

Its not that I think JW is the wrong thing, I just don't know what the right thing is....Turns out lots of things are the right thing.

I like the idea of audiobooks too...do they get the same exposure to vocab listening as well as reading?
Tinkers
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Joined: Mon May 16, 2011 2:05 pm
Location: Reading

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by Tinkers »

Just read something by Neil Gaiman and I thought his words on the matter are rather fitting to this thread.
The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy.
yoyo123
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Joined: Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:32 pm
Location: East Kent

Re: Hetty Feather, Opal Plumstead, Rose Rivers

Post by yoyo123 »

Absolutely!
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