3 ways to fail the resilience part of the 4+ Assessments

In their 4+ Assessments, your child will be expected to demonstrate how they handle things when they are hard for them. They will need to show resilience. It is important that you teach your child how to be resilient in their 4+ Assessments. How to demonstrate this at all times in their 4+ Assessments.

I thought it would be helpful to share with you three real life examples of students who did not pass their 4+ Assessments because they were not able to show the Assessors how they handle things when they are hard for them (of course they may have failed on other aspects too)

Joan

A happy, confident and calm girl, Joan went into her 4+ Assessment at a Top North London girls’ school filled with excitement. Joan was a very bright 3 year old girl and had mastered many aspects of 4+ Assessment preparation. The one thing she struggled with was to deal with things when they were ‘hard’ for her. In our lessons, generally she would walk away when she didn’t know how to do something. We also did one in person Mock Assessment and she did exactly the same thing. If something was too ‘hard’ for her, she would simply walk away. In this particular Assessment she was asked to complete a puzzle and she couldn’t find one of the pieces. She three several puzzle pieces on the floor and then walked off to a different activity. She did not pass this Assessment.

Ricky

He was one of the youngest in my cohort of students last year. August born, he was nearly a year younger than some of my other students. Although he was younger, Ricky had mastered many of the skills needed to be incredibly successful in all of his 4+ Assessments. Ricky had developed a habit of giving the wrong answers on purpose when he would find things ‘hard’. As in, rather than ask for help, he would just do it wrong purposely. Eg. We would play a game in which he would have to find the missing numbers on the number line. If he didn’t know the answer, he would just give me a random number. We worked through many strategies to support him with this and things definitely improved. In one of his Assessments at a Top South London School, Ricky was asked to reverse a toy car out of a car park maze. He gave it a go but then got stuck. He told the Assessors ‘I give up!’ and he walked away from the activity. He was not successful at this school.

Sara

A sweet, kind girl, Sara worked very hard to prepare for her 4+ Assessments. She did however have a tendency to give up quickly on the tasks that she deemed too ‘hard’. She could sit and colour in for hours for example but if she was given a lego task where she would have to build something specific, she would often get frustrated and ask her mother to help her or to finish it for her. In her 4+ Assessment at a top Central London School, she was asked to place 8 beads onto a string in a particular order. Unable to figure out the pattern, Sara told the Assessor to finish it for her. She handed the Assessor the string and went off to do something else. She was not successful at this school.