Building a Weekly Routine With Primer
The biggest difference between students who keep building momentum and those who drift usually isn't talent, it's rhythm. There's no single schedule that works for every family, but the Format tab gives you the controls to set a pace that actually fits yours, and a missed week doesn't have to derail anything.
On this page
Choosing a Delivery Mode
Delivery Mode, at the top of the Format tab, is really a question about how independent your student is day to day:
- Self-Paced: the student reads, practices, and quizzes on their own. Best for a student who's ready to work independently, or a schedule where you're not available to sit with them for every session.
- Parent-Led: you teach, the student takes the quiz, and you get printable plans. Best for a hands-on homeschooling style, or a younger student who needs an adult guiding the lesson itself.
- Hybrid: the student reads independently, and you review their practice together afterward. A middle ground for a student who can handle the reading alone but benefits from a debrief.
None of these are permanent. It's worth reconsidering the mode any time your household's routine changes, not just when you first set up a student.
Plan Generation: how much gets built, and how it's chosen
Further down the Format tab, Plan Generation controls how lessons get queued up:
- Lessons per batch (1, 3, or 5): how many lessons Primer builds at once. A smaller batch means less to plan around; a larger one means fewer trips back to generate more.
- Auto-approve lessons: whether a freshly built lesson becomes available to your student immediately, or waits for you to review it first.
- Slot composition: for families who want more control, each lesson slot in a batch can be set to High priority (a skill you tagged HIGH on the Curriculum tab), Needs practice (something the student recently struggled with), Pinned skill (an exact skill you choose on the Path page), Focus skill (anything from your Learning Focus list), or Exploration (picked for variety). Leaving a slot on Auto lets Primer balance all of this for you.
A smaller, more frequent batch (say, one or three lessons at a time, several short sessions a week) tends to be easier to sustain than a large batch meant to be worked through all at once. The right size for your family depends on how your week is actually structured, not a fixed rule.
If a week gets missed
One missed week won't undo progress. Nothing expires, nothing resets, and lessons stay queued exactly where they were. The only real cost of a gap is momentum, so the most useful thing to do when restarting isn't to catch up all at once, it's to pick one short lesson and get back into a rhythm, then let the pace rebuild from there. A guilt-free restart matters more than a perfect streak.
Signs the pace itself needs to change
If missed weeks keep happening, that's worth treating as a signal about the pace, not the student. A few things worth checking:
- A smaller Lessons per batch setting, so there's less sitting unfinished at any one time.
- A different Delivery Mode, if the current one no longer matches how much time you have to be involved.
- Whether the sessions themselves feel too long; see Personalizing the Lesson Player for Your Student for settings that can make a lesson feel lighter.
And if you're not sure what's actually causing the friction, emailing your student's teacher is a fast way to get a second opinion.