The idea of the Five Minute Box as an early intervention and screening tool, grew out of years of experience with primary age children who had failed to master the art of reading and spelling, and who had become disenchanted with the process of learning. By Junior School age, these children needed regular extra teaching and often needed to use expensive resources to motivate them to acquire the skills. Withdrawing children from lessons to teach them basic skills meant that they were missing subjects that they enjoyed.
Benefits
The Five Minute Box was designed within school settings to fulfil several purposes:
To screen all children on entering school at age 5 to ensure that none ‘slip through the net’ and to provide baseline data for school records.
To provide an easy to manage teaching system for any child who needed extra time to learn or to consolidate basic skills, managed by a Teaching Assistant for a few minutes a day.
To ensure that any child who may turn out to be dyslexic has had multi-sensory teaching for 2 years rather than waiting to be diagnosed at the age of 7 and then having to start from the beginning again.
To work alongside any phonic reading and spelling scheme already in place in school.
Most importantly, it is a system that children engage in with the utmost enthusiasm, taking ownership of their learning and progressing from the very first time they open the Five Minute Box.
