When it might be right to do some Verbal Reasoning specific work in year four

If and only if children are old for their year and/or have been reading consistently every day and have been recognised as being considerably older than their age when it comes to reading (perhaps two years in advance of national average) then doing some initial VR work might be possible.

We’d suggest starting this during the Summer/end of last term of year four and basically advancing the work we’d normally recommend for a child in year five.

During the summer you can probably cover each of the question types in terms of technique and perhaps do some short untimed tests to check knowledge and understanding.

You will find when you do this that where technique and knowledge is sound the mistakes will pretty much all still be vocabulary based. Hopefully this will drive home for you how important continuing to work on vocabulary development and spelling will be throughout year five.