I've put together a free printable practice pack: six sheets, eighteen questions, answers and a one-line fix for every one of them. You can grab it from here.

This post is about why it's built the way it is, because the design is the useful part and it's worth explaining even if you never download a thing.

Wrong answers are not all equal

Mark a practice sheet the usual way and every question tells you the same one thing: tick or cross. They could do it, or they couldn't.

The trouble is that a cross doesn't tell you why, and why is the bit you can actually act on.

Here's the useful part: children don't get things wrong at random. Ask a room of ten-year-olds what 7 x 8 is and the wrong answers bunch up in the same few places. Loads of them say 48, because they've slipped a row and answered 6 x 8. Hardly anyone says 51.

So the questions in this pack put the right answer next to the wrong ones children genuinely give - not filler invented to pad the row out. If your child circles 48, you haven't just found out they got it wrong. You've found out they're one row adrift on their tables, which is a five-minute fix.

Mark for which wrong answer, in other words, not just for whether it's wrong.

Three common mistakes, worked through

Here are three from the pack, with the reasoning behind each. The other fifteen are on the sheets.

"I would of told you"

The options are of and have. Loads of children pick of, and it's worth understanding why, because it isn't carelessness.

They've heard "would've" spoken thousands of times, and they've never once seen it written down. Said out loud, "would've" and "would of" are very nearly the same sound. They're not misremembering a rule. They're writing down what they hear, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do and just happens to be wrong here.

The fix, in one line: would've is short for would have. Never of. There's no sentence in English where "would of" is correct.

That last bit matters. Plenty of rules have exceptions, and children learn to hedge accordingly. This one doesn't, so say so plainly.

Which is bigger, 1/2 or 1/5?

A surprising number of children answer 1/5, and their logic is impeccable: five is bigger than two.

They're reading the bottom number as a size. It's the opposite - the bottom number is how many pieces you've cut the whole thing into, and the more pieces you cut it into, the smaller each one gets.

The fix, in one line: cut a cake into five and a cake into two, and see which slice you would rather have.

Do it with something real if you can. Fractions are one of the few topics where thirty seconds with an actual cake beats a page of practice, because the misconception is about what the notation means, not about arithmetic.

If FROG is GSPH, what is BIRD?

This is a letter code question, and plenty of children sitting a mock have never seen one. That's not a gap in their education - codes aren't on the national curriculum - but it does mean nobody should expect a child to work the method out from scratch with a clock running.

The method: line the two words up and ask what happened to each letter individually. F to G is one step forward. R to S is one step forward. O to P, G to H. Every letter moves forward by one.

Apply the same move to BIRD: B to C, I to J, R to S, D to E. CJSE.

The fix, in one line: don't look at the whole word. Look at what happened to the first letter, then check whether the same thing happened to the rest.

Once a child has the habit of comparing letter by letter, this whole question type goes from impossible to routine in about ten minutes. It's one of the best returns on time in the entire 11+.

The six printable practice sheets

Six sheets, three questions each, answers on the last page. A sheet takes about ten minutes.

Print the whole thing or just the sheet you want. A Year 4 child working on times tables doesn't need the 11+ reasoning page, and handing it over anyway is how a ten-minute job turns into a bad evening.

Let them have a go before you show them the fix. The mistake is the useful part. A child who's made an error and then had it put right remembers the correction far better than one who was told the rule up front and never had a reason to care.

About the email

The page asks for your email address and then emails you the pack, so it's still there next week when you actually get round to printing it. It also means I can send you the next ones as they're written.

It doesn't withhold anything. There's a plain download link on the same page that works whether you give me an address or not, and it isn't buried in the small print. If you want the PDF and nothing else, take the PDF and nothing else - I'd rather you had it.

Where this fits

If you're preparing for a selective test, the Kent Test guide covers what's actually on the paper and how it's scored, and the block counting post is a free non-verbal reasoning set in the same spirit as these sheets - the method, the trap, and six questions with worked answers.

And if you've read why practising one thing at a time backfires, you'll spot that these sheets are deliberately not twenty questions on one rule. Three questions, then a different sheet, is much closer to how this stuff is worth practising.

These eighteen questions came out of the same bank The Revision Wizard uses - five subjects, KS1 through to 11+, all of it marked automatically. Your child never works through the whole thing: it picks the questions they're getting wrong and leaves the rest alone.

If there's a trap your child keeps falling for that isn't in here, come and say hi on Instagram and tell me which one. The next pack is being written now, and it'll go straight to the front of the queue.