Step One

Harmattan

A poem about the dry season wind. Questions about imagery, sound and how a poem is built.

How to Make Chin Chin

A set of instructions. Questions about order, purpose, and the words instructions use.

A Letter to Aunty Bisi

A personal letter. Questions about purpose, feelings, and the parts a letter is built from.

Market Day

A non-fiction style recount, with questions about facts, order and word meaning.

Save Our Library

A persuasive notice. Questions about how writing tries to change your mind, and how to spot it.

The Lost Goat

A short story, with questions about what happened, what it means, and what the words tell us.

The New Boy

A playscript. Questions about dialogue, stage directions and what characters do not say out loud.

The Weaver Bird

An information text about a bird. Questions about facts, how the text is organised, and technical words.

The Week the Water Stopped

A diary written across five days. Questions about feelings changing over time, and how a diary is written.

Tortoise and the Drum

A traditional-style tale with a trickster and a lesson. Questions about character, motive and meaning.

Capital letters and full stops

Where sentences begin and end, and which words always take a capital.

Nouns, verbs and adjectives

The three jobs a word can do — naming, doing, describing — and how the same word can switch jobs.

Past and present

Verbs that say now and verbs that say then, the -ed that usually makes the change, and the verbs that change on their own.

Question marks and commas in lists

When a sentence is asking, and how a comma keeps a list — or a grandmother — safe.

The ch and th sounds

Telling ch and th apart, at the start and the end of words.

The sh sound

Two letters, one sound. Hearing and spelling sh at the start and end of words.

Plurals and endings

Adding -s, -es, -ing and -ed: the rules, the doubling and dropping they need, and the words that refuse to follow them.

Words that do a job

Words that mean nearly the same, words that are stronger or weaker, and why a writer picks one and not another.

Planning a story

Beginning, problem, ending — the three parts every story needs, and why the middle one is the hard one.

How long did it take?

From one time to another: counting minutes and hours between a start and a finish, and the traps in "half past".

Left, right, turns and grids

Saying where something is with a letter and a number, and which way you face after a quarter or half turn.

Measuring, and why units matter

What we measure, which unit to choose, and why a number on its own tells you nothing.

Reading a clock

Short hand for the hour, long hand for the minutes: o'clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to.

What makes a shape that shape

Sides, corners and faces — the words mathematicians use, and why a shape is defined by its properties and not by which way up it is.

Change at the market

Naira and kobo, adding up a basket, and finding change by counting on rather than taking away.

Which sum do I need?

The hardest part of a word problem is not the arithmetic — it is working out which of the four operations the story is asking for.

Column addition and subtraction

Adding and taking away in columns — and what the carry and the exchange actually mean, so they are never magic.

Rounding and estimating

Nearest ten, nearest hundred, and why a rough answer worked out quickly is often the one you need.

What a fraction is

Equal parts, what the two numbers each mean, and why a bigger bottom number makes a smaller piece.

What multiplication really means

Groups, arrays, and why 7 × 3 and 3 × 7 give the same answer even though they mean different things.

What place value means

Why the same digit can be worth one, ten or a hundred, and what the columns are actually for.

Tally, table and bar chart

Counting with tally marks, turning them into a table, and reading a bar chart — including what a tall bar does and does not tell you.

Food chains

How energy passes from plants to animals along a food chain, and reading the arrows the right way.

Habitats

A habitat is a place a living thing calls home, and why each suits the things that live there.

How living things are different

Living things vary, and we can sort them into groups by the features they share.

Keeping your body healthy

What our bodies need to stay healthy — good food, exercise, sleep and being clean.

What a plant needs to grow

What plants need to grow well, and planning a fair test to find out.

Choosing the right material

Matching a material to a job by its properties — strong, waterproof, bendy, see-through.

Heating and cooling

How heating and cooling change materials, and which changes you can undo.

Solids, liquids and gases

The three states of matter, what tells them apart, and thinking like a scientist about a fair test.

Looking after our world

Using what we know about living things and materials to care for the world around us.

Day and night

Why we have day and night — the Earth spinning, not the Sun moving round us.

The four seasons

The four seasons, how the weather and daylight change, and what stays true each year.

How sound is made and travels

Sounds are made by things shaking (vibrating), and the sound travels to our ears.

Light and shadows

Where light comes from, how a shadow is made, and why a shadow changes size.

Pushes and pulls

Forces as pushes and pulls that start, stop, speed up, slow down or change the shape of things.

Making a bulb light up

A simple circuit: what a bulb needs to light, and why a gap or a switch stops it.

Where energy comes from

Living things get energy from food; machines get it from fuel or electricity.

Planning a fair test

The rule at the heart of science: change one thing, keep the rest the same.