Thinking, reading and maths for curious kids

It started at our kitchen table. I built it for my daughter, who is in Year 3. Watching her work through the usual practice books, two things kept happening: they drilled things that did not matter, and when she got a question wrong, nothing explained the thinking she had missed. Every lesson here began as an answer to something she genuinely struggled with. She is still the first tester of everything in it.

Years 3 to 6, roughly ages 8 to 12. The reading level assumes a confident reader. Some lessons stretch above that deliberately, because a child who finds school easy needs somewhere to go, and a practice round mixes easier and harder questions rather than sitting at one level. For context on the timing: the Opportunity Class test is sat in Year 4 and the Selective High School test in Year 6, so the same material suits a child working towards either one, or towards neither.

A Learn deck of short slides that builds the idea up with worked examples, then a Practise round of eighteen questions drawn at random from that lesson's bank, so the round is different each time. Every question offers a hint if it is wanted, and an explanation afterwards whether the answer was right or wrong. The explanation says why the right answer is right and why the tempting wrong one was tempting, which is the half that practice books tend to leave out. Questions a child gets wrong are kept so they can be tried again later, and a lesson can be repeated as often as you like.

From the Department's own practice papers rather than from other people's prep books. The real test papers are never released, so the practice papers are what anyone can check against. We worked through them question by question, recording what each one actually asks rather than what prep material assumes it asks.

That matters because much of what is sold as preparation is built on an older version of the test, or on guesswork. Some topics that fill coaching books turn out not to appear in those papers at all, and some question styles that are barely mentioned turn out to carry real weight. Reading questions about poems, for instance, ask what an image does to the reader rather than asking a child to name it.

So if a topic does not appear in those papers it is not in the practice questions, however common it is elsewhere, and the topics that carry the most weight get the most lessons. The papers are published free by the Department, so none of this has to be taken on trust. Worth saying plainly: they are practice papers rather than real ones, because real ones are not published, and some of them are earlier papers reissued under a new label.

The content sits inside the NSW primary curriculum, and it is aligned to what the Opportunity Class and Selective High School tests assess. Aligned means matched to the real format rather than drilled against it: the same question styles, in the same proportions the papers actually use.

It is a skill builder rather than a cram course. The Department itself says coaching or tutoring for the placement test is not necessary, and that too much coaching can harm a child's wellbeing, and we agree. Nothing here promises a place in a school, because nothing honestly could. The tests are used as a benchmark for what to cover and to what standard, and the skills underneath them are worth having whether or not a child ever sits one.

The app itself is free: every lesson, every practice question and every game, with no account to create. The paid version is one prepaid key: it turns on Kit, the optional tutor, unlocks Kit reading a piece of your child's own writing, and opens the grown-up's section, where worksheet checking and the week's reports live. Credits are spent on three things: asking Kit, having a piece of writing read, and marking a worksheet; the reports cost nothing. Nothing else asks for payment details, and lessons never depend on any of it. The offline app stays free, and anything a child has already been working through does not move behind a paywall part way. Full prices are on the pricing page.

Nothing a child does in the free app is collected: scores, medals and progress all live on your device, there are no accounts, and you can save a backup file whenever you like. There are three exceptions, all paid and all off until a grown-up unlocks them with a prepaid key. The first is Kit, the optional tutor: when a child asks it a question, what goes to our server, and on to a large language model (an AI service) to generate the answer, is the lesson page or practice question on screen, which lesson it comes from, their question and the chat so far, and, once they have answered, the answer they chose with the correct one and the app's own explanation, because Kit cannot teach a wrong answer it has not been shown. Our server stores no conversation, question or name. Recent Kit chats are kept on your child's device only, inside your own backups; none of that reaches us. The second is worksheet checking, in the grown-up's section: one photo of a page of written work is sent to be marked, only when a grown-up chooses to send that photo, and neither the photo nor the marking is kept by us. The third is Kit reading a finished piece of your child's own writing, in the Writing topic: what goes to our server, and on to a large language model (an AI service) to read it, is the piece they wrote and the task it answered, nothing else, and it goes only when a grown-up chooses to have that piece read. Our server keeps neither the piece nor the reading, only a one-way fingerprint of the piece's text so that reading the same piece again is not charged twice. This website is a different thing: like most websites, it counts visits.

See privacy for the detail.

Through the contact form. It is the only way to reach us, and it is deliberately not an address inside the app: a child using LearningKit should never be one tap from a message box. The form is hosted by Tally rather than by us, so whatever you type into it goes to them as well.

No. It runs in a browser. If you want it on a home screen you can add it like an app, and it keeps working with no connection once it has been opened, so a car trip or a waiting room is fine. There is nothing to download from an app store, no updates to approve, and no permissions to grant.