IHETC School
Primary — laying the foundations
At this age the difficulty is about attention far more than intelligence. Sessions are therefore short and daily, and a concept is revisited until it holds before moving on.
What the child works on
Reading
Decoding first, then comprehension. The second begins the day the first is secure.
Mathematics
Numbers, operations, first word problems. Always starting from a concrete situation.
Early science
Observe, describe, explain, check. Curiosity settles in before terminology.
Primary, in figures from the catalogue
These figures can be recounted: they are the subjects actually written for the cycle and the rule for validating a concept. Support is judged first on what it contains, and that can be checked page by page.
- subjects at primary level
- 3
- recommended session length
- 20 min
- stages to validate one concept
- 4
All included in the same subscription.
Repeated often rather than lengthened.
The last one is assessed work.
Why twenty-minute sessions
An eight-year-old's sustained attention is measured in minutes, and a session that stops while it is still working leaves them willing to pick it up tomorrow. That willingness builds regularity, and regularity produces the whole result at this age. Four short sessions in a week achieve far more than one long one on Sunday, and they protect the child's relationship with schoolwork — which is what will still matter in ten years.
What the tutor does with your child
The tutor makes the pupil work, and lets them find the answer. It is a doctrine, written down and held session after session: it decides what your child will be able to do alone on assessment day.
- It changes angle the moment an explanation misses
- It leaves the answer to the pupil and stays alongside until they find it
- It has the result checked by a second route
- It goes back to the missing prerequisite, even one from an earlier year
- It keeps the concept open until the pupil restates it in their own words
Explore in detail
- Reading and writingEverything else depends on it. A child still decoding laboriously at the end of primary school will not understand a maths problem in secondary: the difficulty moves, and gets blamed on the wrong subject.
- MathematicsAt this age mathematics is not abstract: it describes situations. A child who sets out an operation without knowing what it represents will pass drill exercises and fail the first word problem.
- Early scienceThe aim is not to accumulate knowledge but to install a method: observe, describe, explain, check. It is the only point in schooling where you can learn to be wrong with no marks at stake.