Extending vocabulary for the 11+

It is fair to say that this year’s pupils are an extremely bright little bunch. So much so that they are beginning to move up to the 11+ Verbal Reasoning and English papers. Already! And with the 11+ papers come the wonderful vocabulary questions. Last week’s activities alone assessed children’s knowledge of the following words: compulsory, obligatory, shrewd, sagacity, folly, deterrent, hamlet, abhorrent, fortify, inaugurate, augment, segregate and rhapsody. Most adults I know do not use language of this standard.

A child’s language acquisition begins with the words that they hear in their home setting… but, honestly, I cannot remember the last time I used the word sagacity in everyday speech. So how do we develop our children’s ability to retain the meanings of these unfamiliar words? Below are a couple of things to try:

1.    READING. Specifically, reading older, more advanced books. David Walliams is fine before bed but all children should have a book that they are reading from which uses unfamiliar vocabulary. Please see the suggested reading list on my website for book ideas. If you are a pupil of mine, you have access to my lending library and are welcome to borrow any of these books any time.

2.     WORD JOURNAL. Get a notebook, label each page with one letter of the alphabet. Every time your child comes across an unfamiliar word, record it in the correct section with a definition (obtained from Google or parents or a dictionary). Try to use the words in sentences, re-visit them often and play games such as hangman with them.

3.    WORD OF THE DAY. Just Google ‘word of the day’ and you will be presented with many, many options. There is also a ‘word of the day’ on this website using words drawn from the 11+ papers. Look at older words, the website keeps words from the last 30 days.

Do remember that the children do not need to be able to spell the words, they simply need an idea of what they mean for those ‘word analogy’ questions. Perhaps they could use them in class, I’m sure that their teachers would be euphoric (word of the day 01 January 2021). 😊