Non-verbal reasoning tests pattern recognition using shapes rather than words, which means it is unfamiliar to most children when they first meet it — and also that it improves quickly with practice, often faster than any other paper.
The questions draw on a limited set of transformations: rotation, reflection, size, shading, position, and the number of elements or sides. Once a child knows the list, the task becomes systematic — check each feature in turn rather than staring at the whole figure hoping the answer appears.
Timing is tight and questions are worth the same regardless of difficulty, so a child who spends two minutes on a hard question has lost the easy marks further down the paper. Moving on and returning is a skill worth practising deliberately.
These notes cover rotations and reflections, nets and 3D shapes, and series and odd-one-out questions, with a method for approaching each type.
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