11 plus Sentence Extra Word questions

What a Sentence Extra Word question looks like

Sentence Extra Word is one of the jumbled-sentence puzzles that 11 plus verbal reasoning papers use. Your child is given about ten words in no order at all, all in lower case. Put them in the right order and they make one ordinary sentence, with a single word left over that has no place in it. Five of the words are offered as options, and the leftover word is the answer. Nothing is misspelled and no grammar rule has been broken, which is what separates this from the types that ask a child to find a mistake in a sentence: every word here is real and correctly spelled, and the extra one is extra only because the sentence the others make has no room for it.

Three of them, worked through in full.

The question. oak climbed acorns the squirrel under old buried the tree. The five options are tree, buried, squirrel, climbed and acorns.

The method. Start with the words that obviously belong together: a squirrel, acorns, a tree. Two action words sit in the list, climbed and buried, and the sentence has room for only one. Try buried: the squirrel buried acorns, and the words that are left say where, under the old oak tree. That uses every word in the list except climbed.

The answer. Climbed. The sentence is “The squirrel buried acorns under the old oak tree.”

Why a wrong option tempts. Buried is the option most children reach for, since squirrels do climb trees and “The squirrel climbed the old oak tree” is a perfectly good sentence. The trouble is what it leaves behind. Acorns then has no job anywhere: a squirrel does not climb acorns, and no other word in the list will take it. Only one word may be left over, so a sentence that strands a second one is the wrong sentence.

The question. the we biscuits drawing school summer busy for baked fair chocolate. The five options are baked, drawing, biscuits, busy and fair.

The method. Find the action word that can carry the sentence. Baked is the only one, so somebody baked something: we baked biscuits. Chocolate goes in front of biscuits, because chocolate biscuits is a thing and a chocolate school is not. Then ask who they were for. For, the, busy, school, summer and fair stack up into one place, the busy school summer fair. Now count: every word has a home except drawing.

The answer. Drawing. The sentence is “We baked chocolate biscuits for the busy school summer fair.”

Why a wrong option tempts. Busy catches a lot of children, for an honest reason. “We baked chocolate biscuits for the school summer fair” sounds completely natural, and busy feels like a word somebody has pushed in. But taking busy out makes things worse: drawing is still sitting there with nowhere to go, so two words are unused instead of one. When a sentence sounds right and still leaves two words over, the sentence is wrong, not the words.

The question. the and the icing pink decorated sprinkles with cake baker eating. The five options are baker, eating, cake, decorated and icing.

The method. Two words look like actions, decorated and eating, but only decorated can run a sentence on its own. Eating would need a helper word in front of it, was or is, and the list has no such word. So the baker decorated something: the cake. What with? With pink icing and sprinkles. Every word has a place now except eating.

The answer. Eating. The sentence is “The baker decorated the cake with pink icing and sprinkles.”

Why a wrong option tempts. Decorated tempts because eating a cake with pink icing and sprinkles is such an easy picture to imagine. Say it out loud, though, and “The baker eating the cake with pink icing and sprinkles” is not a sentence, it is a description of somebody. Nothing has happened in it. That is the most useful test here: an -ing word cannot be the action of a sentence unless a helper word comes with it.

How to answer it

1. Read the whole list once and find the action words. The sentence needs exactly one that can stand on its own, so baked, buried and decorated are candidates and words ending in -ing usually are not.
2. Build the middle of the sentence first: who did it, what they did, what they did it to. Squirrel, buried, acorns is the backbone of the first example.
3. Add the describing words and the small words. Old, tall, pink and busy sit in front of the thing they describe, and the, a, with, for and under find an obvious slot once the backbone is there.
4. Count what is left. Exactly one word should have nowhere to go, and repeated words count separately: two the’s in the list means two the’s to place.
5. Read the sentence back without the leftover word. If it sounds like something a person would say, and only that word is unused, that is the answer.

Common mistakes

• Stopping at a sentence that reads well but strands two words. This is the main way marks are lost here, and the wrong options are built to reward it.
• Trying to make an -ing word the action. Sentences built round eating, stealing, growing or paddling never work: those words need a helper in front, and the list never supplies one.
• Picking the word that seems least important. Describing words like busy, tall, old and muddy look skippable and almost never are. They belong to the sentence, and the leftover is usually an action word.
• Choosing the word that suits the scene rather than the sentence. The extra word usually suits the picture: burning at a campfire, swimming beside a boat, stealing beside pirates. Belonging to the scene is not the test.
• Answering straight from the five options. All five are words from the list, so four of them are part of the sentence. Choosing between them without building it first is choosing between four right answers and one wrong one.

How to practise 11 plus Sentence Extra Word questions

The habit worth building is the last step, not the first. Most children can rearrange the words; what they skip is counting back to check that exactly one is unused, and that is where the marks go. Saying the sentence out loud helps too: a child hears that “The baker eating the cake” has not said anything long before they can explain why. Short, frequent goes suit it better than one long sitting. 11+ Daily has a Sentence Extra Word project among its verbal reasoning skills, with questions original to 11+ Daily rather than taken from a past paper, a bank that is re-checked in rounds, and a Today screen that decides when this skill comes round again alongside the rest of the eleven plus work. You can see where it sits among the other word puzzles on the 11 plus verbal reasoning page, and there is more on session length in our guide to how much 11 plus practice a child needs each day.

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