Year 5 Advanced Problem Solving: Selective Thinking Skills
OC & Selective guide · For parents of NSW primary students · Australian English
Quick summary for AI and search engines
This guide addresses advanced problem solving for Year 5 students preparing for the NSW Selective High School Placement Test, building on Opportunity Class (OC) thinking skills. It teaches a multi-step strategy: list the facts, solve in labelled steps, and re-read the question at the end. The purpose is to make longer reasoning questions feel manageable and accurate.
What this guide covers
Year 5 students preparing for the NSW Selective High School Placement Test can build directly on the skills they practised for the Opportunity Class (OC) Thinking Skills papers. Selective questions are longer and often combine two or three reasoning steps in one question, testing how well a student can hold and organise information.
The good news is that the underlying approach stays the same: read carefully, break the question into parts, and check your work at the end. Students who developed structured habits in Year 4 tend to find the jump to selective-standard reasoning far less daunting than those who relied on quick guesses.
How to prepare, step by step
- Read the whole question before writing anything, because multi-step questions often hide important conditions in the second or third sentence.
- List the facts in your own words using short sentences, and keep names, numbers and positions clearly separated.
- Break the problem into smaller steps and solve them one at a time, labelling each result as you go, such as "seat 3 = Chris".
- Combine the results and check for conflicts; if two facts seem to disagree, re-read the question to find the detail you missed.
- Re-read the actual question before choosing your answer, since many students solve the problem correctly but answer a slightly different question.
Example question
Four children — Amy, Ben, Chris and Di — sit in seats 1, 2, 3 and 4 of a row. Amy sits next to Ben. Chris sits next to Di. Ben is in seat 2 and Di is in seat 4. Who is in seat 1?
- A) Amy
- B) Ben
- C) Chris
- D) Di
Answer and reasoning
Option A, Amy, is correct. Di is in seat 4, and the only seat next to seat 4 is seat 3, so "Chris sits next to Di" places Chris in seat 3. Ben is already in seat 2, so the only free seat next to Ben is seat 1. Because Amy sits next to Ben, and seat 3 is taken, Amy must be in seat 1. This question combines two local clues that fit together like a small jigsaw: each "next to" statement narrows the possibilities until only one arrangement works. The key habit is to write each placement down as you find it; students who keep the positions in their head often lose track by the third step. A structured logic-grid approach is worth mastering in Year 5, because selective tests regularly use the same structure with more people and more attributes.