If you are sitting an entrance exam in the 2024 season, you will be approaching the end of all your hard work. The break from school routine over the summer is a time when you can put in a last push. It is during these weeks that you can fine tune mathematics skills, work through those tricky non-verbal questions and keep plugging away at building vocabulary for the verbal reasoning. Creating a good balance between revision and rest will mean you enter exam season on top form.
Key Mathematics Skills
Test yourself on place value up to seven digit integers and up to three digit decimals. Can you multiply and divide any number confidently by 10, 100, 1000? If not, use a Gattegno chart to help with revision.
Make sure you have key mathematics skills at your fingertips. Long multiplication and long division are great skills to practise at speed. Set a timer and see if you can beat your daily record. Can you divide a six digit integer by a two digit integer accurately in 2 minutes? If so, challenge yourself to achieve this in 1 minute.
Check you have a secure knowledge of fractions, decimals and percentages and their relationship with each other. Can you use 10% of a number to calculate other percentages? How does knowing 1% of a number help you to calculate any other percentage? Can you find the whole from a given percentage? For example, if 80% of a number is 120 what is the whole number?
Verbal Reasoning
If you have been building a vocabulary list over the past year, now is the time to go back and revise from this.
Break down each verbal reasoning skill and work through any particular questions that you are unsure of. For example, you may want to focus on cloze procedure or it may be synonyms and antonyms that you want to brush up on. For cloze passages, read and re-read the passage and sentence in order to fit the best word into the blank space.
Play Boggle or Scrabble with family and friends. It’s a really good way to learn about words and their meanings.
Non-verbal Reasoning
Many non-verbal skills can be developed through craft and art activities such as origami. Building models is a way to give your spatial ability a work out without sitting through test papers. Jigsaws are great for rotation skills. None of these activities will be done as part of formal tuition, but they are key to developing non-verbal reasoning.
If you have a particular non-verbal skill that you need to develop, don’t delay. The cube nets are often the questions that students ask for help with. There are many ways you can tackle cube nets. Often, the first step is to draw out the net and fold it up. Take time to work slowly through which faces will always be connected and which faces cannot be connected. If there are arrows on the faces, where do they point? Use a process of elimination to discount cubes or nets that are not contenders for the correct answer.
If you are working through multiple choice non-verbal test papers and want to improve your ability to spot small differences between shapes, cut off and hide the multiple choice answers. Instead of selecting the correct answer, draw the shape you would expect to see. Check your prediction against the correct answer. How closely did you match the shape? Was there a tiny detail you missed?
Comprehension
Yes, you will be practising comprehension test papers, but you also have time during school holidays to read for pleasure. Blend books that you know you will enjoy with books that will challenge you. My personal favourites over the past year have been When the Sky Falls (Phil Earle), The Last Bear (Hannah Gold) and October October (Katya Balen). I am also a massive fan of Alex Rider (Anthony Horowitz). Be prepared to re-read a passage if you need to check meaning. Make reading enjoyable. You will be more likely to ‘lose yourself in a book’ if you make reading a really special time. Make sure the house is quiet and you will not be disturbed. Relax on some big cushions and bring on the popcorn.
Rest and Relax
Giving your brain time off from revision is very important. Go outside. Play with friends. Play sports. Get a good bedtime routine going and get plenty of sleep. When you decide to revise, make sure you are in the right mood to focus. Work hard – play hard. Good luck.
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