Eleven Plus Pressure

It is easy to tell when the Eleven Plus examinations are growing closer. My thoughts turn more and more to keeping you and your child calm. Naturally you can both turn to prescribed drugs. Equally far more of us may want to turn to methods of keeping calm by less intrusive and addictive means.

So of course some of us allow our thoughts turn to Yoga. Now there must be many different types of yoga. Some of us think as yoga as being part of Eastern mysticism. To others it is way of slimming and keeping fit.

This is a bit like the Eleven Plus examinations. Some children set out to do very well. Other children just try to pass. There are also many children who do the work because their parents wish the examination on them.

So some of us do yoga because we think that it is a means of combating the stresses and stains of every day living. We hope that Yoga will help us to develop mental and physical fitness.

So we exhort our children to work through Eleven Plus papers because we want them to have a healthy and desirable attitude in the actual examination. We want them to be calm and relaxed when they face problems in the examinations. If your child is in a good mental state then he or she will be less likely to become worried, strained and tense in the examination.

But you also want to build mental toughness. This is when you child really desires to pass the examination and will do that extra bit of problem solving on a difficult question in the examination.

We accept that we will feel physically and mentally tired a lot of the time in our daily lives. We suppose that our children are also going to feel tired and strained. So if you go to bed feeling fit, healthy and happy then you hope that your Eleven Plus child will feel the same.

So simply lie in bed every morning for those few extra minutes and encourage your child to do the same. This means that on the day of the examination you hope your child will wake happy and refreshed – and climb quietly and peacefully out of bed. You want no strain, no pressure on the morning of the first examination. Never encourage your child to do any work at all. Mention the examination no more than once or twice. Take it in your stride and hope that your child does the same. That is Yoga. The frustration of the mental and the physical. In the examination you want a fusion of mental and physical alertness. So try to practice what you preach.