Whether you’re supplementing a tutor or doing all the preparation at home, the activities you do with your child outside formal sessions can make a significant difference to their 11+ English performance. Here are the most effective ones — all practical, none requiring specialist knowledge.
Read Together Daily
The single most high-impact activity. Read aloud to your child even if they’re a confident independent reader — the texts you choose together will typically be more challenging and more varied than what they’d choose alone, and reading aloud is an excellent way to encounter new vocabulary in context.
When you encounter an unfamiliar word, don’t just define it. Ask your child to guess the meaning from context first. Then confirm or correct, and use the word in a sentence yourself. This contextual vocabulary building is exactly what the 11+ tests in its reading comprehension section — inferring meaning from context.
Play Word Games
Vocabulary games are not frivolous preparation — they are preparation. Scrabble, Bananagrams, and similar tile games build word knowledge and spelling at the same time. “Word of the day” rituals — one new word at breakfast, reviewed at dinner — add up to 365 words a year and cost nothing. Cryptic crosswords (with assistance) build lateral thinking about word meanings that translates directly to comprehension skills.
The key is making vocabulary building feel like something you do together, as a family habit, rather than something imposed as additional schoolwork. Children who associate learning new words with family fun acquire vocabulary at a very different rate from children who encounter it only in formal drill.
Write Together — Not Just Separately
Try a shared writing exercise: both parent and child write a short piece on the same prompt, then compare. This models that writing is something adults do and find engaging, normalises the experience of different people approaching the same task differently, and gives your child the rare experience of seeing their parent struggle and try and revise. That last point matters: many children believe good writers write perfectly the first time. Watching a parent cross things out and try again is a more honest representation of the writing process.
Use Past Papers — But Mark Them Properly
Past papers are freely available for most 11+ English exams, and they’re the closest thing to practising the real thing. But they’re only useful if they’re marked and reviewed properly — not just ticked or crossed, but discussed: “What did this question ask for? What did you write? What does the mark scheme say was expected? Where was the gap?”
This review process is where the learning actually happens. A paper done and put away teaches very little. A paper done, marked, discussed, and followed up on is genuinely instructive.
Talk About What Your Child Reads and Watches
Discussing stories, characters, and plots — whether from books, films, or television — builds the analytical habits that 11+ comprehension tests. Questions like “Why do you think that character did that?” or “Did that ending feel right to you?” aren’t just conversation — they’re training for inference and interpretation.
The goal isn’t formal discussion. It’s the habit of paying attention to storytelling — noticing how things are constructed, forming opinions about them, being prepared to say why you think something and hear a different view. These habits transfer directly to reading comprehension tasks that ask for inference and character analysis.
Thorogood English’s 11+ English groups open January 2027. Join the waiting list to be first to know when bookings open.
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