IHETC School
Primary — laying the foundations
At this age the difficulty is almost never intelligence: it is attention. Sessions are therefore short, and a shaky concept is revisited before moving on.
What the child works on
Reading
Decoding first, then comprehension. The second only begins once the first is secure.
Mathematics
Numbers, operations, first problems. Always starting from a concrete situation.
Early science
Observe, describe, explain. Curiosity before terminology.
Why twenty-minute sessions
A child of eight sustains attention for minutes, not hours. A long session mostly produces fatigue and resistance: the child then associates schoolwork with an unpleasant moment, and it is that association you will have to undo later. Four short sessions in a week beat one long one on Sunday.
Explore in detail
- Reading and writingThe most common and most misread case: the child produces the sounds correctly, so the adult concludes they can read. In fact all their effort goes into decoding and none is left for meaning. Working on comprehension before reading is fluent is pointless — decoding must be automatic first.
- MathematicsThe child has the technique down and still fails the problem, because they hunt for keywords (« altogether » ⇒ addition) instead of picturing the situation. A strategy that works until year 5 then collapses. The cure is not more arithmetic: it is having them describe the situation before writing anything.
- Early scienceThe child recites « water boils at one hundred degrees » without ever linking the sentence to anything observable. The knowledge stays a word, and vanishes in three weeks. A scientific idea not tested against an observation is not understood, it is memorised.