Good luck to everyone and thanks for starting the thread, somewhereonearth! DS10 starts his seventh year of school tomorrow. Not expecting any big changes. Don't know for sure yet who his form teacher will be, but his maths teacher reckons it's likely to be him, which would be fine. Doesn't matter all that hugely as all subjects taught by specialists anyway. He gets to go away for a camping weekend, with white-water rafting etc., next weekend, so that's the big local nervousness; so much not DS's scene, but he doesn't want to be left out of the experience. The big global nervousness is that he'll do the main entrance procedure for senior school late this term ("pre-assessment", but the assessment is a formality in practice for a bright child; they decide on the basis of a "reasoning test" - "not an IQ test", "you can't prepare for it", "verbal, non-verbal and numerical reasoning" - interview and school report, to which 10/11yos to offer places, conditional on sufficiently high performance in exams taken at 13). They don't take all or only the highest performers on the reasoning test; and in any case, turns out DS's performance on NVR tests is not that stunning - like me, he is highly accurate, but slow because he insists on understanding (and verbalising!) every aspect of the reasoning, not using instinct at all. *&(*^$ mathematicians. He should take the ceiling off the verbal and numerical parts, though.
