One of the greatest challenges at 11+ is to understand the comprehension passage. There are two ways to get better at this: listen to Bald Worm's reading the paper teacher podcast and...read more books!
Task: Please read the 'Midsummer Nights Dream' and 'Macbeth' short stories from Geraldine McCaughrean's Stories from Shakespeare.
(Image by Thomas Geezer; used under Creative Commons agreement)
Clive James is a brilliant writer. This is what he has to say about reading:
It was my third year at Sydney Technical High School [in Australia], and our English class was being taken by a history teacher while our regular teacher was away ill. Though he conspicuously wore the first Hush-puppies I had ever seen, I can't remember the history teacher's name. But I can still remember everything he said. To keep us in order, he had been asking us what we read at home. I said that I had been reading the collected works of Erle Stanley Gardner. He said there was nothing wrong with that, but that the whole secret with what he called 'sludge fiction' was to enjoy it while you built up the habit of reading, and then move on to something hard. The very idea that there might be something interesting further up the road had not occurred to me before that day.
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