It's Monday 4 May. KS2 SATs begin one week today — Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling first thing on Monday 11 May, then Reading on Tuesday, then Maths Papers 1, 2 and 3 on Wednesday and Thursday. This is the last full week.
The temptation is to throw everything at it. Resist. The week before SATs is the week you do less, not more — but you do it with intent.
The seven-day shape
Here's the plan, written assuming you're reading this on Monday 4 May:
Monday — light maths warm-up
20 minutes of arithmetic. Times tables, basic operations, mental maths. Aim for fluency, not difficulty. The goal of today's session is to remind the brain how it feels to be quick and right. Confidence is a muscle and this week is the week to flex it.
Evening: normal. Don't talk about SATs unless they bring it up.
Tuesday — reading paper familiarity
20 minutes on the reading paper — one short text, one set of questions. Not a full paper. The point isn't endurance. It's recognition: remembering what each question type wants and how to spot it.
Evening: an actual book of their choice for 20 minutes. Reading for pleasure on a Tuesday in May counts as revision and you don't have to tell them.
Wednesday — SPaG drill
15 minutes on a SPaG paper. The grammar paper is the most "knowable" of all five — the rules are finite, the answers are exact. A Wednesday SPaG session 6 days before the real paper does more good than the same session would have done in February.
Focus areas: word classes, sentence types, the apostrophe rules they always confuse, the subjunctive. Quick wins, no surprises.
Thursday — reasoning, but gentle
15 minutes of reasoning. Not a timed paper. A handful of questions from each of the topic categories — fractions, percentages, ratio, measurement, geometry. The point is to remind the brain that reasoning is the same content as arithmetic, just dressed differently. Word problems are reasoning's main mask.
Evening: a film together. Something gentle.
Friday — nothing
No revision. Genuinely none. School is busy enough. The Friday before SATs week is the day your child remembers that life still exists outside of revision. A normal Friday evening — pizza, sofa, screen, sleep — is exactly right.
The Friday-off rule is the one most parents break and most regret. A child who has revised seven days in a row walks into Monday flat. A child who's had one proper evening off walks in fresh.
Saturday — a single mock-style session
One paper, your choice. Probably arithmetic — it's the shortest, the most contained, and the most reassuring to do well on. Run it the way described here: 24-hour pause before marking.
Saturday afternoon and evening: weekend life. Friends, family, outside, swimming, anything.
Sunday — final warm-up, then stop
This is the most important day. The wrong instinct is to cram. The right instinct is to do almost nothing.
Morning: 10 minutes — three or four arithmetic questions and two reading-paper retrieval questions. Confidence shots. No new content. No difficulty.
Mid-afternoon: pack the bag. Pencil case, water bottle, anything the school has asked for. The equipment checklist here. The act of packing is itself a calming ritual.
Evening: completely normal. Bath, book, sleep. Earlier than usual if you can manage it without making it weird. More on the Sunday evening here.
What not to do this week
A short list of things that look productive and aren't:
- Don't start a new topic. If they don't know fronted adverbials by now, they won't learn them in time. Focus on the things they nearly know, not the things they don't
- Don't do full timed papers back to back. The school has done these. Doing more produces fatigue, not improvement
- Don't compare with other families. The school gate this week will be full of confessions of cramming. None of it is doing the cramming families any good
- Don't add "extra" at bedtime. The brain consolidates during sleep, not before it. Late-night revision is actively harmful in week one of the taper, let alone the night before
The thing that matters most
This week, your child reads you more than they read any revision book. The single biggest predictor of how a Year 6 child walks into the exam hall is how the adults around them have been behaving for seven days.
Be calm. Be a bit boring. Don't talk about SATs unless they bring it up. When they do, listen first, respond second. More on what to say back here.
The week before SATs is short, structured, and lighter than you'd expect. Hard the wrong week, easy the right week. Your child needs to arrive on Monday rested, fed, packed, and confident. That's the brief. Days remaining counter if you need it.
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