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Five minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday

Published 5 October 2026

Five minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday

Published 5 October 2026

The short version

• Short and often beats long and occasional, for reading, tables and spellings alike.
• Five minutes you actually do is worth more than twenty you plan.
• Pick a time that already exists in your day rather than making a new one.

Why short and often wins

Because the thing you are building is automatic recall, and that is built by repetition rather than by duration.

Reading, times tables and spellings all have the same shape. Your child needs the answer to arrive without working for it, so that their attention is free for the actual task — following the story, solving the problem, writing the sentence.

You cannot get that in one long session, any more than you could learn to catch a ball in a single afternoon. You get it by coming back to it.

There is a practical reason too, and it is the one that decides whether any of this happens: a five-minute habit survives a bad week. An hour-long one does not.

Pick a time that already exists

The commonest reason home practice stops is that it needed a new slot in the day, and there is not one.

So attach it to something that is already happening:

• In the car, on the way to school or a club
• While the pasta boils
• The five minutes before bed, before the story rather than instead of it
• Walking home

📌 Times tables in particular do not need a table, a pencil or a screen. They are a conversation. That is why the car works so well.

What five minutes actually looks like

Times tables. One set at a time — the sixes until the sixes are solid, then the sevens. Ask them in random order, not in sequence: a child who can only reach 7 × 8 by singing up from 7 × 1 does not know it yet. Spend the five minutes on the ones they get wrong, not the ones they get right.

Reading. Ten minutes is the usual advice and five is fine on a bad day. If they are on decodable readers, sound out and blend rather than guessing from pictures. If they are past that, let them choose, including things that are too easy.

Spellings. Look, cover, write, check. Three words done properly beats ten done badly. Then use one of them in a silly sentence out loud — it sticks far better than another round of copying.

How to stop it becoming a fight

This is where most home practice actually dies, so it is worth being direct about it.

Stop while they are still willing. The temptation when it is going well is to keep going. Do not. The feeling they are left with is what decides whether tomorrow happens.

Never use it as a punishment. The moment times tables are what happens when a child is in trouble, you have lost, and it is very hard to get back.

Do not correct at length. If they get one wrong, say the right answer cheerfully and move on. A five-minute session with a three-minute explanation in the middle is not a five-minute session.

Let them off sometimes. A child who knows they can say "not tonight" is far less likely to need to.

Missing days is fine

Genuinely. This is not a streak to protect.

Parents often stop entirely after a bad fortnight, on the reasoning that the habit is broken. It is not. Pick it up on a day that works and carry on. Three days a week for a year beats seven days a week for a month.

What about apps and games?

They are useful for exactly one thing: they get done.

The honest case for a game over a worksheet is not that it teaches better. It is that a child will do it without being asked twice, and the practice that happens beats the practice that does not.

Ours are free and built for short bursts. Crumb Tables does one set of times tables at a time, which fits the five-minute rule almost exactly. Change Please and Clockwork Crumb cover money and telling the time.

⚠️ They are practice, not teaching. The teaching is at school, and the reading you do together is doing something no game can.

If you want something physical

Some children get much more from something they can hold, and none of this is expensive:

• A wall chart where they eat. It gets looked at without anyone making it a lesson.
• Flash cards, so you can keep the wrong ones in a separate pile.
• A wipe-clean book, so a mistake costs nothing and there is no page to ruin.
• Counters, for a child who does not yet see what multiplication is — arranging 24 into four rows of six does more than any drill.

The one rule worth keeping

If you can only do one thing, read with them.

Reading aloud does more, across more subjects, for longer, than any other five minutes you will spend. Everything else on this page is a bonus.

Where this comes from

• 10 top tips for parents to support children to read, Department for Education, updated 25 April 2022 — the few-minutes-a-day point and letting children choose what they read. ⚠️ That page is old and contains Covid-era text; we have used the advice and not the dates.
• Phonics screening check: information for parents, Standards and Testing Agency — sounding out rather than guessing.

⚠️ The advice on how to run a five-minute session is our own, not government guidance.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

About us

And who we are: CrumbJar is a British puzzle-games studio. We make daily word and number games that children and adults play on a screen, and the games are free. So we have an interest in you thinking well of screens, and an interest in you buying things through our links. We would rather you knew that than found out.