The Importance Of reading for the 11 Plus
Reading is a crucial and key skill required for the 11 Plus exams, especially English comprehension. Being able to read quickly and accurately comes with repeated practice, and therefore it is essential that your child is an avid reader when preparing for the 11 Plus.
Reading regularly also helps to improve your child’s vocabulary (another skill tested in the 11 Plus in both English and verbal reasoning exams). For more help with your child’s vocabulary, check out our 11+ vocabulary podcast below!
We’d recommend that your child reads daily. The time they read for is up to you and depends largely on your child, but getting into a routine of daily reading is key. Try to ensure that your child is reading a wide range of texts and genres. In a comprehension exam, they could be given anything from a newspaper article to an old classic text.
But most importantly, work with your child to find texts and stories they enjoy. (Not everything on the list below will be right for them!) If your child enjoys the book they are reading, they’ll be more enthusiastic and interested, making it a lot easier for them to improve at reading.
Below, we’ve complied a list of recommended books to read when preparing for the 11 Plus. This list is by no means exhaustive, as we could go on forever with book recommendations! However, these are our favourites and a good place to start.
If you have any other recommendations, leave them in the comments below!
Classics
Hans Christian Andersen — The Complete Fairy Tales
J.M. Barrie — Peter Pan
Frances Hodgson Burnett — The Secret Garden
Lewis Carroll — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol
Rudyard Kipling — The Jungle Book
C.S Lewis — The Chronicles of Narnia
Robert Louis Stevenson — Treasure Island
Jonathan Swift — Gulliver’s Travels
J. R. R. Tolkien — The Hobbit
Jules Verne — Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Adventure Stories
Malorie Blackman — Hacker
Frank Cottrell Boyce — Millions
Roald Dahl — George’s Marvellous Medicine
Mark Haddon — The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Jeff Kinney — Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Edith Nesbit — Five Children and It
Edith Nesbit — The Railway Children
Louis Sacher — Holes
Lemony Snicket — A Series of Unfortunate Events
Fantasy Stories
David Almond — Skellig
Holly Black — The Spiderwick Chronicles
Orson Scott Card — Ender’s Game
James Dashner — The Maze Runner
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — The Lost World
Michael Ende — The Neverending Story
William Golding — Lord of the Flies
Anthony Horowitz — Stormbreaker
Eva Ibbotson — The Secret of Platform 13
Lois Lowry — The Giver
Derek Landy — Skulduggery Pleasant
Sophie McKenzie — The Medusa Project
Garth Nix — Mr Monday
Phillippa Pearce — Tom's Midnight Garden
Phillip Pullman — The Northern Lights
Rick Riordan — Percy Jackson and the Lightening Bolt
J.K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Alex Scarrow — Time Riders
Mysteries
Agatha Christie — And Then There Were None
Siobhan Dowd — The London Eye Mystery
Arthur Conan Doyle — Sherlock Holmes
Cornelia Funke — The Thief Lord
Julia Golding — The Diamonds of Drury Lane
Anthony Horowitz — The Diamond Brothers
Erich Kaster — Emil and the Detectives
Carolyn Keene — Nancy Drew
M.G. Leonard — The Highland Falcon Thief
Nature Stories
Richard Adams — Watership Down
Roald Dahl — Fantastic Mr. Fox
Roald Dahl — The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me
Kenneth Grahame — The Wind in the Willows
Hugh Lofting — Dr Dolittle
George Orwell — Animal Farm
Dr. Seuss — The Cat in the Hat
Anna Sewell — Black Beauty
Dodie Smith — The Hundred and One Dalmatians
E.B. White — Charlotte’s Web
Historical Stories
Nina Bawden — Carrie’s War
Anne Holm — I am David
Caroline Lawrence — The Roman Mysteries
Michelle Magorian — Goodnight Mister Tom
Michael Morpurgo — Warhorse
Ian Serallier — The Silver Sword
Robert Swindells — Blitzed
Non-Fiction
Sarah Albee — Accidental Archaeologists: True Stories of Unexpected Discoveries
Christopher Lloyd — Britannica All New Children’s Encyclopedia: What We Know and What We Don’t
David Long and Simon Tyler — The World's Most Magnificent Machines
Glenn Murphy — How Loud Can You Burp?
Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson — Two Truths and a Lie
Guy Raz and Mindy Thomas — The How and Wow of the Human Body: From Your Tongue to Your Toes and all the Guts in Between
Poetry
William Black —The Tyger
Robert Browning — The Pied Piper of Hamlin
Lewis Carroll — Jabberwocky
Robert Frost — The Road Not Taken
Mary Howitt — The Spider And The Fly
Rudyard Kipling — If
Edward Lear — The Owl and the Pussycat
Alfred Noyes — The Highwayman
Alfred Tennyson — The Charge of the Light Brigade