Teachers
What the app offers at each level, what it withholds, and the page of the curriculum behind every one of those decisions.
New to this approach? Why this curriculum delays arithmetic sets out Benezet’s experiment, what his tests showed, and what it does not prove.
The principle this app is built to obey
The TEN3 curriculum delays formal arithmetic. Primary 1 to 4 is oral and physical work. Primary 5 brings counting by 10s, 5s, 2s, 4s and 3s, then the tables for those numbers, then mental arithmetic late in the year. Primary 6 is where formal instruction begins — and the introduction records that even that was a concession, since Benezet preferred the seventh grade.
So an app that drills written arithmetic early does not support this curriculum; it defeats it. The level gate is built into the code rather than offered as a setting, and there is no way to switch it off. If a child needs work below Primary 5, the answer is off the screen.
The curriculum itself
Read the curriculum
All eight levels, with what you need to hand, how often each activity runs, and whether the work is oral, physical, mental or written. Searchable, and each level prints as a handout.
ReadyPrimary 5
Counting by 10s, 5s, 2s, 4s and 3s, then their tables; 6s to 9s after the halfway point, and why the 9s pattern works.
The level with activitiesWeek planner
The curriculum’s sixteen weeks of planning pages, filled in here instead of on paper. Activities come from the level you pick, and what you type is kept on this device.
ReadyThe year at a glance
Every level and every activity on one page, with its cadence. The PDF has no table like this.
For planningWhat is on screen, level by level
| Level | What the curriculum does | What the app may do |
|---|---|---|
| P1 – P4 | Counting out loud, comparing real objects, estimating then measuring, telling time, handling money. Oral and physical throughout. | Nothing. At most a reference for you — the hundred chart, the calendar. No practice for the child. |
| P5 | Counting by 10s, 5s, 2s, 4s, 3s, then the tables for them; 6s to 9s in the second half; making change; estimating games; fractions with manipulatives; mental arithmetic late on. | Counting and pattern work, the tables, making change, estimating. All of it mental — nothing worked out in written columns. |
| P6+ | Formal arithmetic begins. | Mental arithmetic, making change, telling time, and the formal work as it is added. |
The activities
Every entry names the page of the curriculum PDF that justifies it. An activity with no curriculum page behind it does not get built.
What the app deliberately will not do
These are not gaps waiting to be filled. Each one is something the curriculum rules out, and building it would be a step backwards.
Running Pattern Painter with a class
Show me fills the whole chart at once, for a projector or a shared screen — use it after the children have counted, not instead. The star beside a number is earned only by counting all the way to 100; revealing the pattern does not earn it.
A child's stars are kept in that browser on that device, and nowhere else. A shared tablet therefore shares its stars, and a wiped device or a private window loses them. Nothing about a child is transmitted anywhere, so there is no record to request, retain or protect.
Two things still missing from the curriculum itself
Primary 5 mental arithmetic runs on Practical Problems in Mental Arithmetic,
grade IV, which the curriculum notes seems to be available nowhere except the Library
of Congress
; substitutes are still being evaluated. Primary 6 to 8 points at
Wentworth & Smith's School Arithmetics, with the starting point not yet
decided. Until those are settled, anything the app offered there would be invention
rather than curriculum.