Finding the right 11 plus tutor can be tricky, especially with new tutors and centres popping up on a daily basis. Be sure to find a tutor that suits your needs and whose teaching style works well with your child and keeps them motivated and engaged. The best and most reliable source is word…
Selective schools have been a prominent feature of our system for a long period of time. Many would be correct in considering them to be particularly competitive, as the demand for places is huge. Depending on the area, children need to achieve on average between 75% and 80% to be in with a chance of…
Working through test paper after test paper is not learning. If you had asked me at the age of 9 or 10 what goals I had set, I would have probably told you that you were crazy, but as an adult, I can now appreciate how important it is to set goals. Why should you…
Studying is a skill in itself. How to study is a very important skill that very few schools teach. Apart from things like note taking and colour coding, setting small achievable targets is the best way to create that route to your end target. Setting goals for studying, when done consistently will pay massive dividends.…
We have all heard the saying ’practice makes perfect’. Well, that saying is not exactly true- it needs some further insight and explanation. Take for example, writing your name. How do you know that what you have written is correct? When you first learned to write, you had to be told that in English,…
Do you struggle with exams? Find your mind wandering? Doodling over your notes? While going through school I found myself choosing more creative subjects such as Design Technology and Music. I loved creating things from scratch, whether it was a new product such as a speaker system in D.T. or a new composition in Music.…
A CBBC Newsround survey of 1200 children suggests that less that 1 in 4 children aged between 10 and 12 do not have a social media account. The age limit for using social media is 13 years and over. Of the children who have social media accounts, almost a quarter of them are said to…
Teachers talk a great deal about the importance of exam “technique”. However, this wording is meaningless to students and parents without further explanation. I wish to offer up my understanding of what it means to have sound technique in an English essay. Most mark schemes are also fairly difficult for students and parents to navigate…
Our year 4 and year 5 11+ students have recently been learning how codes questions work in Non-Verbal Reasoning. There are a few techniques you can use to answer these types of questions more quickly and more accurately. The first thing to do is look at the different position numbers and find shapes which have…
If so, can self-control be taught? When I read that The Marshmallow Experiment was replicated yet again, it got me thinking about why this is. The Marshmallow experiment is one of the most famous social science experiments. The first time this experiment was carried out was in 1960, by a professor at Stanford University. In…
The trend toward making everything gender neutral (unisex in old money) is gaining momentum. Canada is introducing gender-neutral passports. Citizens will have the option of M, F or X on their passports. John Lewis has announced that all its children's clothing range will be 'gender neutral' from now on. This means that instead of the…
Can you solve this teaser?
During one of our holiday courses, we were working through a Non-Verbal Reasoning paper one section at a time, marking the section and then going over the questions the children got wrong. Now, it was a reasonably tough paper and it was the first full paper these year 5 children had attempted. All was going…
During our Easter holiday course, the year 5s were learning about 3D and spatial Non-Verbal Reasoning. We were learning how to draw 2D elevations (plan view, side view and front view) from a given 3D shape, but we were also trying to figure out the 3D shape and draw it using only the given 2D…
Recently, the year 6s have been learning the difference between facts and opinions. They have been using this information to learn how to write realistic newspaper articles. We spoke about how newspaper articles are a mixture of facts, opinions and even persuasive writing. The writer of the article will have an opinion (every person does)…
RTG Tuition is a professional tuition service, with its own tuition centre and publishing company. RTG was established in 2007 by Rupa Harji to provide bespoke tuition for young children. Over the...
