The 7 plus Assessment Audit- mastering Maths, Comprehension, Composition and Reasoning.
/In this blog, I would like you to audit what your child does and doesn’t know… yet! It is important to do this audit frequently throughout the year to ensure that your child stays on track.
Once you have established the schools that you will be applying to for the 7+ Assessments, you can then begin the audit. This is of course a generic audit. However, when I work with my clients, the audit will be specific to each school that they are applying to (remember that all assessments will be different!)
Ensure your child knows their number bonds to 10.
Seems simple. But this one is often overlooked. Your child needs to have a strong understanding and knowledge of the their number bonds to 10 in order to become masters of the maths curriculum. If your child doesn’t know (and understand!) that 2+7 = 9 how will they know what 20+ 70 is? or 200 + 700?
Spend quite a bit of time teaching your child their number bonds to 10. Complete different activities to embed this knowledge and understanding. Have fun with it! I love to play ping pong with my students. We both pretend to be holding a ping pong bat and we ping each other a number and then we pong each other the answer. This is a great game because we play together and my student can also ask me. In this way the pressure isn’t all on them and they can learn from me and my answers too. Sometimes, I will purposely get it wrong and they love correcting me!
Ensure that your child knows a variety of addition and subtractions strategies
When I first start working with children preparing them for their 7+ Assessments, they are usually 4 or 5 (In Reception or Year 1). Usually, they will know two strategies for addition and subtraction - the column method and using their fingers. Whilst these are great, they are so many other strategies that they can use. Here are just a few of them.
Bonds to 10/20/30/50/100/1000
Fact families
Using bar models
Related facts eg. 7+2=20 so 70+20 =
Using part whole models
Using the number line to add and subtract
Add and subtract numbers crossing the tens barrier
Calculating missing digits
Let’s look at at one of these in detail:Using the number line to add and subtract
When I work with my students, early on I teach them the empty numberline strategy. They simply use their ruler to draw a line on their page. We then input the relevant numbers in order to work out the calculation. Eg. Let’s say we are working out 43 - 27 = ?
I ask them to write 27 on the left hand side of their numberline and I will teach them to count up. We count up to the nearest ten (30) and then count up to 43. I then teach them to add up the jumps and this will give them the answer.
What would most children do here?
Without knowing this strategy, most children would count back in ones from 43. Not effective or efficient.
Ensure your child is confident with the most challenging part of Comprehension in the 7 plus Assessments.
In my opinion, the most challenging aspect of comprehension in the 7+ Assessments is the vocabulary. After all if your child doesn’t understand at least 80% of the words in the text, how will they be able to answer the questions? Notice that I didn’t say that your child needs to know 80% of the words. Rather they need to understand them. They need to be able to infer their meaning given the context of the sentence. We work on this together in our lessons and in the Home Learning tasks that I set my students. The comprehension texts in the 7+ Assessments will be challenging. In order to score 80%-85% (which is what your child will need to score to be successful!) they must develop this skill.
Check out our FREE 7+ Comprehension papers to see the level of difficulty that I’m talking about.
Comprehension in the 7+ Assessments has evolved over the years.
First of all, it has become more challenging. The level of the texts provided is more and more challenging each year. Secondly, the types of genres used in unpredictable. We used to be able to guess that it would most likely be a fiction comprehension but this isn’t always the case. Classics have also been used previously. Newspaper reports have been used. Playscripts have been used.
Always ensure that you cover ALL genres of writing when preparing your child for the comprehension aspect of the 7+ Assessments.
3 types of questions that your child will be asked in the 7 plus assessments
What do you think questions
These are challenging because your child needs to show exceptional understanding of the text in order to be able to answer these types of questions. My students often find these questions challenging because the answers are not specifically in the text and they need to give their own opinions. This is a skill that needs to be worked on, practised and perfected.
Predict what will happen next questions
Prediction questions are often challenging because sometimes my students do not give me answers relevant to the text that they have read. So even though they are predicting, it must be specific and in the context of what they have just read.
Summarise the text/part of the text questions
Summarising is something we love to do! Initially it is very challenging especially if my student has never been exposed to summarising but once they get the hang of it, it’s great! Some of my students think that summarising mean extracting different bits of the text and just copying it. This is not what summarising is. What summarising is is showing that they have truly understood the text by being able to extract the most important points and putting them into their own words. Summarising is giving a brief explanation of the main points of the text.
Some schools in their 7+ Assessments will have two comprehensions. This is why it is so important to know your schools very well. Stamina will be very important.
In order to be effective and efficient at calculating their sums, your child will need to know a variety of strategies for addition and subtraction. They need to know and understand the different strategies that can be used to solve a variety of calculations.
If you would like a bespoke audit created specifically for your child and relevant to each Assessment that they will be sitting, book your Sample Lesson Today.
