Inviting a Student to Their Own Portal
By default, a student's lessons live inside their parent's account, opened from the Family Dashboard. Some families prefer to give an older or more independent student their own sign-in instead: a separate account, tied to the student's own email address, that opens directly into a simplified, kid-friendly portal rather than the full parent dashboard.
Parents start this from Settings > Students, inviting the student by email. Once the student accepts the invite and signs in, they land in their own portal, which is what the rest of this article covers.
On this page
Touring the student portal home screen
A student signed into their own account sees a stripped-down home screen, not the parent's Family Dashboard. It greets them by name and shows their lesson progress ("1 / 4 lessons completed"), a Your Lessons list with the next lesson highlighted Up Next, a Curiosity panel where they can ask Primer any question they're wondering about, and a What I'm Learning panel with an Add a topic button, covered below.
The top-right corner has the same gear icon used everywhere else in Primer, opening a Settings page scoped entirely to that student's own preferences.
Settings: My Avatar
The first Settings tab, My Avatar, lets a student build a small illustrated avatar of themselves: skin tone, hair color and style, eyes, mouth, an optional accessory (glasses, a hat, headphones), shirt color, and background color. Every change saves automatically as it's made.
Two alternate modes sit next to the custom builder. Animal Avatar swaps the illustrated kid for a simple animal icon (lion, tiger, bear, rabbit, and so on) with its own background color choice.
No Avatar turns off the illustration entirely and shows the student's initials instead, a good option for a student who'd rather skip the customization.
Settings: Teacher Avatar
The second tab, Teacher Avatar, is where a student picks the character that reads lessons to them and cheers them on: options include Professor Hoot (an owl), Teacher Scout (an ant), Professor Byte (a robot), Coach Blaze (a dragon), Professor Max, and a minimal option called The Guide. Each has a short personality description and a Hear my voice button to preview it before choosing. No Avatar is available here too, for just the voice with no character shown.
Settings: Notifications
The third tab, Notifications, controls email recaps sent to the student directly: a Daily recap (a short note each morning about what they did the day before, skipped on days with no lesson activity) and a Weekly summary (a weekly snapshot of progress and what to focus on next). Both are off by default and are separate from the parent-facing notification settings covered in Account and Family Settings.
My Path: student-controlled curriculum and "Add a Topic"
Clicking Add a topic from the portal home screen opens My Path, a page that lets a student shape their own curriculum rather than leaving it entirely up to the parent.
What I'm Learning lists every subject (English Language Arts, History & Social Studies, Life Skills, Mathematics, Science) as an expandable row, plus a Custom Topics row at the bottom. A note under the section heading sets expectations: "Your parent will review your suggestions," meaning nothing a student adds here goes straight into their lessons unchecked.
Expanding a subject like Mathematics reveals its individual skills (Addition & Subtraction, Counting & Cardinality, Geometry, Math Facts, Measurement & Data, Place Value, Word Problems) as selectable chips, each showing a mastery percentage once the student has started working on it.
Custom Topics is a free-text field for anything not already covered by the subject list, for example a specific hobby or a topic from school that isn't one of Primer's built-in skills.
To the right, My Interests holds a set of tags (things like "Animals & pets," "Art & drawing," "Nature & outdoors") that Primer weaves into lesson examples and stories, and a text box below that for What I'm Working On, where a student can describe what they're covering in school right now in their own words. A single Save button at the bottom submits everything on the page at once.