Online Math Tutor for Homeschoolers
Math is the subject homeschooling families hand over first, and it's rarely a failure of teaching. It's the subject where staying a chapter ahead stops working — usually around fractions, long division, or the first time a child asks why and the honest answer is "I'm not sure."
We teach one child at a time, live on Zoom, for grades 1 through 8.
Daytime lessons, Monday to Friday
Book a Free Trial
Daytime lessons
Morning and early-afternoon slots, when your day actually has room in it — not squeezed in after a school day you don't have.
Alongside what you use
Keep your curriculum. We teach the idea your child is stuck on and hand them back able to carry on with the book you already own.
An outside read on progress
The hardest part of teaching your own child is having nobody to tell you whether it's going well. You get that in writing every week.
We Don't Sell You a Curriculum
This is worth being straight about, because most tutoring companies answer it one of two ways: either they run a proprietary program your child has to switch into, or they claim to be specialists in whichever curriculum you name.
We do neither. We've read the major programs closely — Singapore, Saxon, Beast Academy, Math-U-See — and what we teach is our own, built out of what each of them does well and what each tends to leave thin. We wrote up that comparison honestly, including where each one is a poor fit, in our guide to choosing a homeschool math curriculum.
The practical upshot is that we're not trying to convert you. If your child is working through Saxon at home, we teach the idea they're stuck on and hand them back able to carry on with Saxon. You keep the curriculum you chose, and the spine of your year stays yours.
Knowing Where They Actually Are
The hardest part of teaching math at home isn't the teaching. It's that you have no reference point. A classroom teacher watches twenty-five children work the same page and knows within a minute what is normal for the age, what is early, and what is a problem. You are teaching one child, and one child is not a sample.
So the measure most within reach is whether you finished the book on schedule — and that is the least reliable one there is. Pace tells you the pages were covered. It says nothing about whether the ideas underneath them stuck, and math is the subject where an idea that didn't stick is quietly load-bearing for everything after it.
Three checks you can run this week that are worth more than a chapter test:
Ask them to explain it, not to solve it
A child who can run the procedure but cannot say why it works has memorised a sequence of steps. That holds up fine until the numbers change shape, which is usually a year later and looks like a sudden collapse rather than an old gap.
Give them something from two chapters back, unannounced
Recent work is propped up by recent practice, so it always looks better than it is. What survives a month without practice is what they actually own.
Change the wording, not the math
Same problem, unfamiliar sentence. If it falls apart, what they learned was the format their curriculum uses rather than the idea it was teaching.
Most of what a trial lesson does is run those three checks properly, with someone who has watched a lot of children do them and knows what each answer tends to mean.
What the First Month Looks Like
Homeschooling parents tend to ask this more precisely than anyone else, because you're the one who has to fit it into a week you designed yourself.
The trial lesson
A teacher works with your child for a full lesson while you get on with your day. The point isn't to impress you — it's to find out how your child thinks and where the ground stops being solid. You get our read afterwards, including if we think they don't need us.
The first few weeks
We start at the gap, not at whatever page your curriculum is open to. That sometimes means going back a year or two for a fortnight, which feels like losing ground and is the opposite. Once the missing idea is in place, the current work usually stops being a fight on its own.
What you get in writing
A short update every week — what we covered, how it went, and one thing to practise. At the end of the month, a fuller progress report. For a parent teaching without a staffroom to compare notes in, that written record is usually the part that ends up mattering most.
When You're Teaching More Than One
Most subjects tolerate a mixed age group. A history unit, a read-aloud, a nature walk — a seven-year-old and an eleven-year-old can share all three in the same hour, at different depths, and both get something out of it.
Math refuses. It is sequential in a way nothing else in your day is, so it has to be taught to each child separately, at their own point in the sequence. That is why math is usually the first thing to break in a multi-child homeschool week: two children need you at the table at the same time, and one of them ends up waiting.
Which is why the useful question is rarely whether to hand over the whole subject. More often it is which single child to hand over — and the answer is the one whose level sits furthest from everyone else's, because theirs is the lesson that cannot be run alongside anybody. Taking that one child back off your plate usually returns more of your week than taking math off it entirely would.
What Homeschooling Parents Actually Ask Us
Can you just take math off my hands entirely?
Yes, and for some families that's the right call — usually once a parent is teaching two or three children at different levels and math is the bottleneck in every one of them. More often we take one strand: the child who needs it, in the area they need, while you keep the rest.
My child is ahead. Is tutoring still worth it?
Often more so. A child who finds their curriculum easy isn't being stretched by it, and boredom does its own quiet damage. We cover this in our guide to tutoring for gifted children.
How do I know whether they're actually behind?
Without a class to compare against, this is genuinely hard, and it's the question we hear most. Knowing what each year is meant to cover, and where students typically come unstuck, is usually enough to tell. Our grade-by-grade breakdown lays both out.
What if they go back into school later?
Math is the subject a returning homeschooler is most likely to be placement-tested on. Worth knowing that those tests walk a fixed sequence, and your curriculum may have taught the same material in a different order — so a child can be genuinely strong and still place low simply because they haven't met a topic the test assumes yet. If a return to school is on the horizon, it is worth looking at a year out rather than a month.
Try a Free Lesson First
One daytime lesson, no card and nothing to cancel. A teacher works with your child, you see how they respond to someone who isn't you, and then we tell you what we'd do and what it would cost — in writing, before you decide anything.
Book a Free Trial