Selective High School prep: a realistic term-by-term plan for Year 5 and 6

You know prep should have started "early." But early was six months ago, and now it's July, and every time you search for guidance you find either "just practise every day" or 23-page PDF schedules that assume you quit your job in April.

The NSW Selective High School Placement Test is in March. If your child is in Year 5, you have roughly eight months. Used well, that's enough. Used badly — cramming in January, burning out in February — it often isn't.

Here is a term-by-term map of what actually matters at each stage.

Term 3, Year 5: Close the gaps, not the test

This term is for curriculum, not test technique.

Before your child can work through Selective practice papers effectively, they need solid Year 5 foundations in maths, reading comprehension, and thinking skills. Practice papers taken too early teach the wrong lesson: kids learn to guess at question types they don't understand yet, and they start interpreting their score as a reflection of ability rather than preparation.

What Term 3 actually calls for:

• Maths: Identify the curriculum strands your child finds uncertain — fractions, percentages, measurement, word problems. Work through these methodically, emphasising understanding over speed.
• Reading: Wide, varied reading — novels, news articles, non-fiction. Fluency at this stage makes Term 4 comprehension practice significantly more effective.
• Thinking skills: One or two logic or pattern activities per week, kept light. The goal is familiarity with a different kind of question, not mastery.

A realistic commitment is 25–35 minutes, four days a week. More than this in Term 3 often backfires — your child still has a full school week, plus everything else.

Term 4, Year 5: Meet the test format

October through December is when you can start working through actual Selective practice materials — but with the emphasis on understanding the format, not chasing scores.

Your child needs to see what a Selective thinking-skills question actually looks like before sitting a timed paper. A spatial reasoning question, a number pattern, a verbal analogy — these are genuinely different from school assessments. First exposure should not happen under timed conditions.

Term 4 focus:

• Maths: Mixed practice papers, marked together with your child. When they get something wrong, the useful question is "what did the problem actually ask?" — not "how do you get the right answer."
• Reading: One structured comprehension passage per week from a past or mock paper, alongside continued wide reading.
• Thinking skills: Work through a published Selective prep book — not to complete it, but to cover the main question families.
• Writing: One short timed write per week, 20 minutes maximum. The Selective writing section rewards quick starting, clear structure, and a strong first sentence. Practise beginning fast rather than planning for five minutes and rushing.

Realistic commitment: 35–45 minutes, four to five days a week.

The summer trap

The families who struggle most in Term 1 Year 6 are often the ones who did the most intensive work over the Christmas holidays — not the ones who eased off.

Summer reading is the highest-return activity and the least stressful. One short maths review session per week is enough to maintain what Term 4 built. The goal is to arrive at Term 1 rested, not already behind on a tutor's schedule.

Term 1, Year 6: Consolidate under real conditions

The test is in March. Term 1 is not the time to discover new content gaps — it's the time to perform what has already been learned, under pressure, on a clock.

By late January, your child should be doing full timed practice tests in a single sitting. This is when you work on timing problems and reinforce accuracy. If content gaps surface now, address them, but the bulk of Term 1 work is consolidation.

A useful weekly structure: one full timed mock on the weekend, two or three focused sessions during the week targeting whatever the mock exposed.

Term	What to focus on	Time per week	Watch out for
Y5 Term 3	Curriculum foundations	2–3 hrs	Jumping to test drills before gaps are closed
Y5 Term 4	Format familiarity	3–4 hrs	Treating practice scores like real test results
Summer	Maintenance and rest	30 min	Over-tutoring during the break
Y6 Term 1	Timed consolidation	4–5 hrs	Introducing new content too late to absorb it

What the timetable doesn't tell you

The biggest predictor of a good test day is not which workbook your child used. It's whether they arrived believing the preparation was theirs, not yours.

That means the question you ask after every session matters. "What did you find hard today?" opens a different conversation than "How many did you get right?" One builds self-knowledge; the other builds score anxiety.

A specific next step: This week, do one informal 15-minute session with no timer and no score. Pick one question type — a maths word problem or a thinking-skills puzzle — and work through it together out loud. What you notice about where your child gets stuck is the most useful data you have right now. If you want a structured way to run these short sessions consistently across Maths, Reading, and Thinking for Year 5–6, joey67 covers Selective-level content across all three areas with a streak tracker that makes the habit stick without daily negotiation.