Getting Better at Thinking Skills

Every family arrives at the same wall. Maths has topics, so you can find the gap and close it. Reading has books. Writing has pieces to mark. Thinking Skills has none of that, and the standard advice, that it cannot be crammed, is true and completely unhelpful on a Tuesday night.

What is on the paper is set out in the Thinking Skills test explained. This is the other question: given a year, what actually moves it.

Why the usual approach stalls

Most families do Thinking Skills in blocks, because that is how you revise a topic. A child sits twenty questions, gets fourteen, and next week sits twenty more and gets fourteen. Months of this produce no movement and a quiet conclusion that the child is either good at it or not.

The conclusion is wrong and the method produced it. Twenty questions in a block trains speed at a thing the child is already doing. What has to change is slower and smaller: the reading of the question itself.

The single highest-value habit

Take one question the child got wrong. Before discussing the answer, ask them to say what the question is claiming, in their own words, without looking at the options.

Most wrong answers die here. The child says something subtly different from what the text said, and the moment they hear themselves do it, the question becomes easy. Not because they learned a technique, but because the error was never in the reasoning; it was in what they thought they had been told.

• All of the members went. Some of the members went. These are not the same claim and the paper knows it.
• If it rains, the match is cancelled. That says nothing about what happens when it does not rain.
• Only members may enter. That is not the same as: all members may enter.

Those three distinctions carry a startling share of the paper. A child who has genuinely absorbed them, rather than been told them once, has picked up marks across every question type at the same time.

What to do about the ones with tables and diagrams

The reasoning questions with a grid, a seating plan or a timetable are the ones where children most often panic and start again from the top. They reward a physical method: draw the grid, put in what is certain, then work only from the constraint that eliminates the most possibilities.

This is trainable in a way the verbal questions are not, and it is worth practising as a drill in its own right, slowly, with no clock, until the child stops trying to hold four facts in their head at once.

How this fits into a week that already has too much in it

Four sessions of fifteen minutes, spread across the week, and none of them at the end of a long day. That is genuinely enough, and it is far more than most children get, because the subject has no homework attached and therefore no natural slot.

It also has to run all year rather than in a block before the test, which is the one scheduling claim in preparing in Year 5 that is not negotiable.

The part that is not practice at all

A great deal of what this paper measures is built by argument at the dinner table: noticing when a claim does not follow, asking what somebody would have to believe for that to be true, being allowed to disagree with an adult and made to say why.

That is not a study technique and it cannot be scheduled, but families who do it have children who find this paper obvious, and the connection is not a coincidence. The reading habit is the other half of the same input.