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Our program is a spine, not a school day. Here is exactly how big it is, and what a real week looks like built around it.
A full Australian school year is nearer 1,000 hours — Queensland state schools run about five hours of class a day, about 200 days a year. We are not trying to replace that. We are trying to hold it steady.
Why the yearly number sounds alarming
Twenty hours a year sounds like nothing. Half an hour a week, taught properly, one child at a time, sounds like what it is: the sequenced core that everything else hangs off.
The bar below is one ordinary Tuesday. The gold is our part.
Roughly to scale across a waking day. The gold is small on purpose. If it were bigger, you would be running a school at your kitchen table — which is the thing home education families left.
A real week
This is a working timetable, not a brochure. Times are anchors, not alarms — most families slide the whole block an hour either way and lose nothing. Pick the band closest to your child.
The teaching move
Say the one thing being learned today, in a sentence a child could repeat. If you can't say it plainly, it isn't ready to teach.
You work the example out loud while they watch. Full thinking, including the parts where you check yourself.
The same kind of problem, together, with you catching errors before they set. Two or three is plenty.
They work alone while you stay quiet and watch. This is where you find out what they actually took in.
Three questions, answered right there. Not a worksheet to mark later — a check you can act on in the next ten seconds.
The thing taught today goes into tomorrow's Five Back. Nothing gets taught once and abandoned.
Ramp, Core, Ladder: the same lesson, three depths. Ramp shortens the steps and adds a model to copy. Core is the lesson as written. Ladder pushes into harder ground once the check is clean. You choose the lane on the day, not at enrolment.
Every single day
Ten minutes, every morning, no exceptions. Five questions, said out loud or scribbled on a whiteboard, drawn from five distances in time. This is the consolidation that makes a small teaching load hold.
Straight recall of the last thing taught. Should be quick.
Far enough back to have wobbled. This is the one that shows you what needs re-teaching.
The spacing that turns a lesson into knowledge. Slow answers here are normal and fine.
Times tables, sounds, spelling rules, dates. Same small set on rotation until it is automatic.
"Where did we use this on the weekend?" If nobody can answer, the learning hasn't landed yet — and that is useful to know.
Spaced retrieval every day outperforms long re-teaching sessions. That's why our teaching hours can be small without the learning being small.
Our hours are the spine. These are the hours that make the year, and they are yours — you were always going to do them, and they were always going to count.
Plainly
If you need a product that fills every teaching hour, hands you every worksheet and tells you exactly what to do from 9 to 3, we are not it. We would rather say that before you pay than after.
If what you need is a sequenced, curriculum-mapped core you can trust — so the rest of the week can be reading, projects, work, animals and actual life without you lying awake wondering what's being missed — that's the thing we built.
You are not required to be registered with us, referred to us, or eligible for anything. In this park, belonging is assumed.