Non-verbal Reasoning 11+ skills

You can prepare for it, and preparation makes a large difference. The figures only vary in a small number of ways: how many elements there are, where they sit, which way they point, how they are shaded, what the lines look like, and how the whole thing has been turned, flipped or layered. Once a child knows what to check, the questions stop being mysterious.

The same checklist every time, in the same order: how many elements, where they are, which way they point, what the shading and line style are doing, and what has stayed the same. Most wrong answers come from spotting one real change and stopping when the rule was two changes at once. A fixed list is slower for a week and much faster after that.

This is the paper interactive practice helps with most. A folded net or a rotated solid on a printed page has to be imagined and then checked against a mark scheme. Here a child can fold it, turn it and see immediately whether they were right, which builds the mental picture much faster. 18 of those exercises are linked from this page.

Slow usually means checking every option against every feature. The faster habit is to work the rule out from the question figures first and predict the answer before looking at the options, then find the prediction among them. It feels riskier and it is considerably faster.

Every one of the 18 non-verbal reasoning exercises linked from this page runs in the browser, with no account and nothing recorded. Each has its own permanent link, so a tutor can send a single activity to a family without sending them anywhere else first.