The Swot Shop’s specialised selective program offers an educational enrichment opportunity for the academically gifted child. Our intellectually rigorous program fosters critical thinking and reasoning and advances your child’s ability in maths, reading, thinking skills and writing.
We offer a challenging curriculum tailored to the specific format of the selective entry exam, ensuring your child learns effective exam strategies, hones their skills in time management, question analysis and critical thinking to excel under exam conditions.
This will help students respond to test questions with speed, accuracy and improved concentration. The Swot Shop approach is to teach, practice in class, complete homework and then test.
Our Distinctive Approach:
- Swot Shop teachers are qualified and experienced professionals who are provided with support and high-quality programs enabling them to deliver an excellent learning experience in every lesson.
- Learning is face-to-face in engaging classes with other students of a similar ability.
- Programs stimulate higher levels of academic thinking and problem-solving skills.
- Our holistic approach focuses on developing the whole student, including their confidence, discipline, and problem-solving abilities, all crucial for long-term success.
What you should know about the Swot Shop Entry Test
- Entry to the Selective Exam Preparation Program at The Swot Shop is via an entry test. This is to ensure the students who participate will benefit and are suited to the challenging nature of the course.
- Our selective entry test has four elements: Reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills and a writing skills task.
- As in the selective examination, reading and mathematical reasoning have equal weighting (25%). Thinking skills has a greater weighting (35%). Writing carries a weighting of 15%.
What to expect from our Selective Program
- An online pilot exam for OC and Selective was held by the Department of Education to move from paper-based tests to online tests as from 2025. To meet this requirement online testing will be integrated into key testing components of The Swot Shop program from late 2024 to ensure optimal preparation for the exam in May 2025.
- Frequent test practice will occur. Parents will be provided with weekly feedback as to children’s scores. The rank and the highest scores, lowest scores and average scores of the group are reported. Students receive most test answer sheets and questions for review.
- Homework is compulsory. These tasks reinforce concepts taught in class. Students are also encouraged to read for pleasure daily.
- We will expose students to new skills, strategies and ideas through teaching and thinking under timed conditions.
- Classes are taught by a qualified teacher and supported by a teaching assistant who is a past Swot Shop student with selective high school experience themselves.
- Students are challenged in the key skills of concentration, speed and accuracy.
- Our Selective Exam Preparation Program is structured to address the four key components covering all relevant aspects of reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills and writing.
- Reading: The course covers many types of texts and activities: Poems, magazine articles, reports, fiction and non-fiction texts, cloze passage, main idea paragraphs, word meanings, drawing conclusions, making inferences.
- Mathematical reasoning: Questions require knowledge of the NSW K-10 Syllabus (Stage 1, Stage 2 and the first half of Stage 3). All questions involve reasoning and problem-solving skills.
- Thinking skills: Understanding and identifying patterns, verbal reasoning, argument analysis, logic and drawing consequences from data etc.
- Writing: Writing skills teaches effective vocabulary to use in a variety of written genres. Impressive sentence creation and variation are then developed, followed by paragraph construction and finally whole written pieces.
- Students experience extensive testing during the lessons. Parents receive emailed results indicating score and rank in reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills and writing and an overall ranking. This ranking often indicates to parents that the student has maintained progress, improved or requires improvement.
- In Lessons 10, 20 and 30 students sit a regrade test and a trial at the end of the course.
