The familiar approach to exam prep is to hand out past papers and keep going until exam day. It has one big flaw: children get better at sitting papers, not at plugging the holes in what they know. A child who muddles a and an on paper one will muddle them again on paper five, because nobody stopped along the way to fix it. A better plan treats the past paper as an X-ray, then spends the time that is left repairing whatever it shows.
The four week plan
- Week 1, the X-ray: sit one past paper with no pressure attached, then sort the whole class's mistakes into groups. Which vocabulary topics? Which grammar points? Reading or listening? What you end up with is a map of where the class leaks.
- Weeks 2 and 3, one group at a time: start with whatever went wrong most. Repair it with a ten minute mini lesson plus a worksheet on that single point, not another mixed paper. Give seventy percent of the time to the weak spots and thirty to the strong ones, because strengths still need touching or they fade.
- Week 4, the dress rehearsal: another past paper, this time against the clock. Let the children compare it with their first one themselves. Marks that have grown in exactly the areas you repaired are proof that the effort worked, and that's far better fuel for exam day than fear.
What to say to them before the exam
Plenty of primary school children are frightened of exams because the adults around them have made exams a matter of life and death. Here's the line that genuinely helps: "This paper checks which parts you've already got and which parts I need to teach again. It marks my teaching just as much as it marks you." A child who sees the exam as a tool rather than a verdict will always do better than the shaky-handed version of themselves.