Thanks for visiting our new website!
We really hope that parents will find this new section interesting and hopefully helpful as we work towards this year’s 11+ examinations. We aim to provide lots of free 11+ resources here to help parents who choose not to go down the tutoring route for whatever reason. We firmly believe that in order to achieve 11+ success, tutors, children and parents need to work as a team and that outside of their weekly lessons children need to be completing plenty of homework.
Week 14 – 7th January 2017
We are now at week 14 of the year 5 eleven plus course and we have spent the last 13 weeks building and consolidating the children’s maths skills, focusing on the topics that tend to confuse – rounding to decimal places, speed and distance, bus and train timetables, currency conversion and world time zones. Also teaching topics that currently don’t appear on the state KS2 maths curriculum until perhaps year 6: ratio and proportion, probability, mean, median, mode, range, volume and some basic linear equations.
Every year we notice that quite a large percentage of our students seem to struggle with ‘time’ in maths; We think that in today’s world children simply don’t need to know how to tell the time or calculate how many minutes there are between certain times because very few 9 or 10 year old children have to be aware of the time; they don’t have to manage their time as it is done for them by their parents. In the last couple of years, children’s understanding of time seems to have deteriorated further with the advent of on demand TV programmes amongst other things.
This year for the first time, we are finding that some of my students are struggling with our coinage system! Again this is understandable as very few children seem to receive pocket money nowadays and therefore have no need to learn to manage their own little cash budget.
We have started the New Year with the inclusion of a page of either synonyms or antonyms in the weekly homework and we are really thrilled to see that pretty well all of our students are trying really hard to learn all the pairs! The promise of a prize for the child who can identify the most pairs seems to be working at the moment, let’s hope we can keep up the enthusiasm for the next 34 weeks! I’ve put this week’s antonyms on the free resources page.
That got us thinking about words that maybe might look like antonyms to year 5 students but actually aren’t. We’ve compiled a list and put them on the free resources page.
