Eleven Plus Rhymes

One of our girls was doing a verbal reasoning exercise today. She had to find rhymes for words. Some of the words were a little obscure. Perhaps the whole point of doing some verbal reasoning exercises is to work through a flurry of words and come up with the right answer. The prize goes to the children who can hear sounds and rhyme words.

Suppose that verbal reasoning exercises had to take into account a second language. This would mean that the words would have to rhyme in English and simultaneously in a second language. These are the first and last verses of a little poem from my youth:

First Verse

On my little guitar
With only one string
I play in the moonlight
Any old thing.

Op my ou ramkietjie
Met nog net een snaar
Speel ek in the maanskyn,
Deurmekaar.

Last Verse

On my little guitar
One string to it now,
I play in the moonlight
Any old how.

Op my ou ramkietjie
Met nog net een snaar
Speel ek in the maanskyn,
Deurmekaar.

The English version changes the second line:
With only one string
One string to it now,

The final line is also changed:
Any old thing.
Any old how.

Paying close attention must be a vital part of Eleven Plus work – but so many papers and exercises cover the same ground again and again. Some times the only real difference between one Eleven Plus exercise and another is how the word order in key sentences has changed.

It must be a particularly English foible – where the ability to work through seemingly repetitive exercises to try to pass a competitive examination is deemed to be more relevant than that of curiosity and creativeness.

A child learns vocabulary in a variety of ways, such as poetry and rhyming words. If parents have spent a lot of time teaching their young child to learn nursery rhymes then it may be possible to argue that the child deserves a better chance in the Eleven Plus examinations. After all the amount of effort that a parent puts into the Eleven Plus preparation must be directly proportional to the chance of passing.

Two Tips for Parents:

Put up with rather inane and seemingly stupid questions.

Remind your eleven year old of all the rhymes you sang together when your child was just a year old.

Some amazingly sane and normal people have managed and built good lives without the benefit of passing the Eleven Plus. It is very sad to think that a grammar school place could depend on finding a pointless rhyme to some rather odd word. Adding a second language, however, would invigorate the examination.