What is the 11+ examination?
The 11+ exam is used to determine whether a year 6 student will be offered a place at a selective secondary school. It is an optional exam, of which the content depends on the school. Some schools set their own papers, whilst others make use of examination boards such as CEM and GL.
How do we help?
We provide tuition in maths, English, verbal and non-verbal reasoning and GL style questions (CEM if required) to help students prepare for their 11+ exams. Lessons are tailored to each student based on their ability and target schools. We have substantial experience of helping students to prepare for and succeed in 11+ exams for both state grammar and private schools in North London and Hertfordshire.
Students are well prepared to tackle different style examinations. As well as teaching content, we set regular papers to complete under exam conditions, some of which are very challenging, some are time pressured, some are multiple choice or short answer based and some require longer mark answers.
As the exam date approaches, lessons and homework will become more focussed on exam technique and timing for that specific paper.
Verbal Reasoning, Non-verbal Reasoning - GL and CEM
We help students with traditional verbal and non-verbal reasoning, including coding questions, selecting odd words out from a list, letter and number sequences and reordering jumbled sentences.
Maths
In maths lessons, students will start by completing a past 11+ entrance paper. This enables us to gauge their level and which topics or question styles they need most help with. We will then work through topics they struggled with in the paper. For example, if ratio is a concept they find difficult, we spend time teaching it in detail so students understand not only how to solve a problem, but why each calculation is necessary. We make revision notes with examples and complete a variety of practice questions. Once the student is comfortable with this topic, we work through another past paper and repeat the process with any challenging topics that arise. As the student progresses, more difficult papers are set, where the challenge may no longer be a topic they haven’t covered, but how to approach more difficult worded problems.
English
English lessons are focussed on reading comprehensions and creative writing. In class, we help students to understand the comprehension passage and ask questions that encourage them to infer meaning. For example, if a character is shaking, that would suggest they are either cold or scared. The student would then be asked to consider which is more likely, based on the context.
We cover a range of question types: multiple choice, short answer and longer answers that require structure. As students complete comprehensions, they must compile a list of all words they do not know the meaning or spelling of and learn these by the next lesson. This helps to improve vocabulary, which is important in comprehension, writing, verbal reasoning and CEM style papers.
The first aspect of creative writing we work on is plots; students learn how to mould their ideas into a plan for a piece that makes sense, is realistic, well developed and sticks to the given title. We then work on including descriptive writing techniques, such as similes, metaphors and personification as well as learning how and where to use punctuation marks (colons, semi-colons, dashes and brackets). For the exam, students must write imaginative, well structured and engaging stories and descriptive pieces under timed conditions.