SlateTale Sign in

It talks, it draws, and it hands your child the pen.

A tutor that works at a slate, out loud, one idea at a time. Then a storyteller when the lesson is done. Ages five to twelve, on the iPad they already use.

Start a lesson See how a lesson goes
Three trays of six How many buns altogether? 6 + 6 + 6 = ? 1 2 3 4 5 6 del
Teacher Three trays, six buns on each. How many is that altogether? Done

A lesson, from the table

A printed worksheet with one corner folded over.

1 Say what to teach

A topic, or the sheet that came home — a photo, a PDF, the text.

A tablet propped on a kitchen table beside a mug of tea.

2 It teaches at the board

Out loud, drawing as it talks. Then it asks, and waits for them.

An open notebook with a fountain pen resting in the fold.

3 You see what stuck

Not a score. What works for this child, and what they found hard.

Twelve cookies, four friends

A real board from a real lesson. Twelve cookies drawn as twelve, in four rows, so the rows are the friends and the answer is one row. A child sees it before they can work it out.

A lesson board: Picnic cookie sharing. Count one row. Twelve cookies as a four by three grid labelled four friends, with twelve divided by four underneath.
A pencil lying across a closed exercise book.

Never the answer

Most of these are for getting the homework finished. This one asks, then waits. And when it slips and writes the answer beside its own question, the board rubs it out first.

what the tutor drew7 × 8 = 56
what your child saw7 × 8 = ?

Drawn for the lesson

A board is good at quantity: rows, a number line, an arrow. What a thing looks like gets drawn, in one house style.

A plant cell in soft coloured pencil: the wall, the nucleus and the chloroplasts.
a plant cell
A spoonful of sugar dissolving in a glass of water.
sugar dissolving
A pair of lungs with the windpipe above them.
where the air goes
The water cycle: sun over a lake, vapour rising, a cloud raining.
the water cycle

Never a number. An image model will happily draw five apples for a lesson about six, so anything a child counts stays on the board.

Then a story

The other half of the name. Say what it should be about — brushing teeth, a first day at a new school — and it draws each page as it reads it aloud.

A fox stepping out of a hedgerow into a field on a bright morning.
The fox came out of the hedge while the field was still wet.
The same fox waiting by a five-bar gate at dusk.
He waited by the gate until the last light had gone.
The same fox curled up asleep in a burrow under a sky full of stars.
By the time the stars came out he was home, and asleep.

Eight to twelve pages. Nothing marked, nothing recorded, and no wrong answer to what happens next.

Easy · 5 of 5
Medium · 3 of 4
Hard

Four out of five moves them up. A slip is not a misunderstanding.

Three flat stepping stones rising one above the next.

Until it lands

Five questions, then five harder. Get them wrong and it teaches the same idea a different way. Twice without getting through and it stops, rather than hand a child the same wall again.

A small brass key.

What we keep

We keep
A nickname, a rough age, the school year, curriculum and subjects you choose, what your child answers during lessons, and short notes on what they found easy or hard.
We never ask
Their real name, birthday, school, address, photo or voice. The tutor is never told your child's name.
How long
Until you delete it, so a lesson can be picked up weeks later.
Your say
Read everything we hold, and delete a child or the whole account whenever you like.

Twenty minutes, one child, one idea.

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