Join ISEB in celebrating National Poetry Day and embrace poetry’s power as a tool for verbal reasoning preparation.
Engaging with poetry is a powerful way to develop and consolidate linguistic skills. Reading and writing poetry helps your child to enhance their reading fluency, improve their grasp of abstract concepts, and supercharge their vocabulary, all while stretching their imagination and communication skills. This is great preparation for the verbal reasoning section of the ISEB Pre-Tests, or any 11+ assessment that covers verbal reasoning.
Get creative this National Poetry Day and explore our tips and tricks for incorporating poetry and word games into your child’s verbal reasoning preparation. To help you get started, ISEB staff have provided their childhood favourite poems.
Reading poetry aloud with your child can help them discover the rhythms of different poems and explore how various rhyming conventions, punctuation, and poetic structures affect the beat. This exercise can also build your child’s confidence in reading aloud, which in turn will improve their pronunciation and reading fluency. This exercise is perfect for a chilly afternoon this autumn.
Poetry has a unique ability to capture the essence of language through rhythm and imagery. Collaborating with your child on writing simple poems, such as acrostics, haikus, or rhyming couplets can help them appreciate how poetry can be used to express emotion and information. Encourage your child to turn their own experiences into short poems or think of rhyming words on the fly. This fun, creative activity can transform long car journeys and help your child gain greater confidence in written and verbal communication.
Choose a favourite poem and work together to memorise it. This exercise not only boosts your child’s memory retention but also improves their ability to recognise patterns and comprehend complex sentence structures, bolstering the skills needed to process and analyse text. Memorising and singing songs together works just as well. The more complicated, the better—bring on the karaoke!
After reading a poem, discuss its themes, emotions, and imagery with your child. Encourage them to think about how the poem makes them feel and why that may be. Ask them how they would go about writing a poem to provoke a different emotion. This is a simple way to foster your child’s deeper understanding and curiosity about language.
The Celandine Fairy by Cecily Mary Barker. “I loved this poem and learned to recite it when I was five. I can still remember it today!” – Sophie G.
An Old Man with a Beard from Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense. “I like this poem because it’s so much fun, and I like the musicality of the limerick. As a non-native speaker, I find that poems with a simple structure stick in my mind and help me with my pronunciation. Plus, the visuals in this poem make laugh!” – Anastasia.
I can read with my eyes shut! by Dr Seuss. “My girls loved Dr Suess, and I always remember this short poem.” – Lisa.
The Tyger by William Blake. “This is one of my favourites.” – Anoushka.
Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne. “My son and I love this poem.” – Sophie C.
Tortoises by Michael Morpurgo. “Here is one of my favourites from Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Carnival of the Animals’ collection. He writes the poems from the perspective of the animal and tries to teach children important lessons about our world. My Y6 class used to love them!” – Stephanie.
If you would like to explore extra tools to help your child prepare for verbal reasoning tests, we have summarised our favourites below:
The ISEB Pre-Tests Admissions Toolkit
Visit the ‘Preparation’ side of the ISEB Pre-Tests Admissions Toolkit, a collection of free resources, guidance, and tools on how best to help your child prepare for their tests. Read our resources on verbal reasoning – ‘Preparing your child for the ISEB Pre-Tests’, ‘The ISEB Pre-Tests Framework‘ – and watch the free webinars with preparation advice from our experts.
English CE 11+ Past Paper Bundle
Did you know our Common Entrance (CE) 11+ papers are a fantastic way to practice verbal reasoning for 11+ assessments, including the ISEB Pre-Tests? The ISEB Pre-Tests and the CE 11+ English Reading paper both focus on a child’s comprehension skills. Preparing for the Pre-Tests with CE English past papers could help your child practice analysing different texts, consolidate their vocabulary and demonstrate their abilities.
Bond Online Premium Plus
Bond Online Premium Plus (BOPP) is the only test practice platform for the ISEB Pre-Tests endorsed by ISEB. It contains thousands of questions and mock tests created by ISEB experts, including comprehensive sections on verbal reasoning. Parents and guardians can trial Bond Online Premium Plus for free for seven days.