What olympiads look like in Class 5
Class 5 is a bridge year. Papers are still multiple choice and still mostly written in school, but they look and feel closer to what older students sit: more questions, fewer pictures, denser wording and less time per question. Many children who breezed through junior papers notice the jump.
The maths moves onto ground that needs real understanding: fractions and decimals, factors and multiples, perimeter and area, angles, and data shown in tables and bar graphs. Science starts to group ideas into systems, such as the parts of the body working together, how soil and water cycles behave, and simple machines. English papers test grammar more formally, including tenses, prepositions and subject–verb agreement, alongside longer comprehension passages.
Two skills start to matter much more from this class:
- Elimination. When four options are offered, ruling out two impossible ones is often faster than solving from scratch. Class 5 papers are long enough that this saves real time.
- Reading data. A good share of questions now hide the actual task inside a table, a graph or a short paragraph. The maths may be easy; finding what is being asked is the work.
The harder questions at the end of many papers now reach slightly beyond the class syllabus or combine two topics. They are a good test of whether a child has understood ideas, not just memorised methods.
How much to prepare
Two to two and a half hours a week, for eight to ten weeks before the exam, is a sensible range. Four sessions of 30–40 minutes work well for most ten-year-olds.
This is also the age when a child can begin to run part of the preparation themselves. A parent sets up the week; the child decides which section to do first and checks their own work. That small bit of ownership pays off for years.
A simple plan
- Week 1: one full timed sample paper from the organiser. Note the score, but pay more attention to where the time went.
- Week 2: start a mistakes notebook. For every wrong answer, write the question in brief, the right answer and one line on why it went wrong.
- Weeks 3–4: revise the weakest two school topics from the textbook, then practise questions on just those.
- Weeks 5–6: elimination practice. For each question, cross out wrong options first, even when the answer seems obvious.
- Weeks 7–8: two more timed papers, a week apart. Compare where time went with week 1.
- Weeks 9–10 (if there is time): reread the mistakes notebook twice, and rest the day before.
What helps, and what doesn’t
What helps:
- The mistakes notebook. It turns every wrong answer into something useful. Ten minutes rereading it before a paper is worth more than a new worksheet.
- Talking about numbers in daily life. Discounts while shopping, distances on a car journey, splitting a bill. Fractions and percentages make more sense when they are real.
- Reading a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Science and GK questions use the vocabulary of information books, not storybooks.
- Knowing that one paper is one paper. A low score in Class 5 says very little about Class 8.
What doesn’t:
- Coaching classes for a school olympiad at this age. For most children, the school textbook, a sample paper or two and a steady routine are enough.
- Five olympiads at once. Each has its own date and its own paper; together they crowd out reading, sport and rest. One or two is plenty.
- Copying answers from the back of the book “to check”. Looking at the answer before trying hard enough removes the learning.
- Long evening sessions during school exams. If olympiad and school tests clash, the school tests win.
The maths prep guide explains the common question types for Classes 5–7, and the olympiad prep guide has more on keeping a mistakes notebook that actually gets used.
Where daily practice fits
Between practice papers, a little daily work keeps grammar, number facts and general knowledge fresh. Ado’s daily is a free quiz of 8 questions a day, including a 60-second sprint, across maths, science, English, GK and reasoning, plus social studies, and a Class 5 student is ranked only against students the same age. It has no ads and no chat, and it complements olympiad practice rather than standing in for it.