ZOOLERO
Fifteen Minutes at the Table
How to teach your 5-to-8-year-old at home without it turning into a fight
This is a guide for parents, not a workbook for children.
$14.99
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Almost nothing in this book is about teaching. It is about the fifteen minutes around it: getting your child to the table, knowing what to say when they are stuck, and stopping at the right moment. Every chapter is one evening you will recognise, and each one ends with the actual words you can use.
Four things from the 53 pages of the book
Stop while it is still going well.
Whether your child comes to the table tomorrow depends far less on how much you got through tonight than on how tonight finished.
Closing the book beats reading it again.
Once your child has been through something once, shutting the book and producing it from memory — saying the words, writing the answers — is harder than reading the page a second time. It is also the one that lasts.
Five short evenings beat one long one.
Fifteen minutes on five evenings beats an hour and a quarter on Saturday morning. The comparison has been run several hundred times: the same amount of practice, broken up, is remembered better and for longer.
Count to five before you speak.
Left to themselves, teachers wait about one second after asking a question. Trained to wait three seconds or more, the answers got longer, more children volunteered, and the number who said nothing at all went down.
What you get
- 53 pages, A4 — reads on a screen, prints if you want it to
- Eleven evenings, each with the sentences to use and the ones to avoid
- A four-week plan that starts at five minutes
- Five printable sheets, including the sentence card and the week sheet
- Instant download, yours to keep
Every claim has a source
This book names its research and says where the evidence is thin. It also names the advice that has not held up — learning styles, the rule about two minutes of concentration per year of age, the promise that praising effort changes everything. A page near the end lists the studies behind every factual claim, so you or your child’s teacher can check them.
This book is also in the Preschool Bundle: six workbooks and this guide for $37.99. See the bundle