I spent obscene amounts of hours playing Minecraft in those yrs. very useless back in the old selective format.
As said before, though, I think it has much more benefit to the new test style. Before, maybe the only thing of use was common sense, which you gain a bit of, and could be applied somewhat to maths. Now, the spatial ability and common sense actually has uses in the thinking skills section.
sports, keep making them play. it's rather enjoyable assuming you get playing time. much of the gaming need comes from boredom at that age.
tutoring ditch is a hard issue, it depends on whether u would make them still study. If you're wanting to do well, e.g. ruse type scores/scholarships, it is basically impossible to do without studying. As far as I am aware, without consistent effort, e.g. reading books, english comprehension and writing was literally impossible to do well on, while on the other hand maths could come relatively naturally, especially since a lot are intuition stylish iirc. I am confident that had I not done any tutoring "mock testing", I would have never engaged in any form of work. This is coming from an "extraordinarily lazy" kid who would literally copy answers for tutoring homework. The only thing that kept me somewhat striving for higher scores was the group environment providing some form of competition. if ur able to send ur kid to somewhere where he comes last the first couple times, I basically guarantee he would try harder.
"doing well at school" is a horrible metric if ur kid goes to a normal 200-300 ranked school. I don't remember learning anything ever in class.
Naplan and ICAS is perhaps a much better metric. ICAS u would need to be looking at distinctions and above, and Naplan would be top arrow and maybe some top bands.
As said before, I think the main problem at that age with learning is the boredom from school. Anything that is remotely challenging is more interesting than regular school, and playing Minecraft in multiplayer and losing is a much more engaging challenge.
Right now at age 9 I believe you could start looking into APSMO books if they're maths inclined. English inclined people normally naturally just read a lot of books, so I'm assuming they clearly aren't interested in reading. This problem is very tough and I struggled with comprehension at that time, but if they find interesting books, it's very natural to fully read them.
Though, do be aware, inviting kids who have been accustomed to solving everything easily, could make them at first disinterested in solving hard problems.
As for the learning approach, this is quite a tough topic. imo, if your kid is intelligent and never engages with olympiads/competitions and things of that sort, they will just become bored once again when it comes to highschool and maybe slip into old habits. Before y11,12, even in the very top selectives, work ethic is quite horrific. The only thing that drives that work ethic is the competition and a need for it that comes about, specifically in y12.
TLDR: went very ranty. Try your luck with APSMO books.
