IB Home Teachers in India for Younger PYP and MYP Learners

Thirty to forty minutes of real work for a child of seven or eight, and forty-five to sixty for a ten or eleven-year-old, including settling time and a short break. Attention, not content, sets the limit. A teacher proposing ninety minutes for a young child is planning around a fee rather than around the learner, and the last half hour of such a session is usually copying rather than thinking. Two short sessions in a week beat one long one at every age below twelve.

Build the things that get measured later. The Primary Years Programme has no external examinations and no published grades, so the goals are capability rather than scores: reading fluently enough to follow a long passage, estimating before calculating, planning two minutes before writing, and starting work without an argument. Ask the teacher to state their three-month goals as behaviour you can observe at home. If they can only describe topics they will cover, they are teaching a syllabus that does not exist at this stage.

Be present for the first session, then move within earshot and out of sight. Children perform for a watching parent and hide the confusion the teacher needs to see, which slows everything down. The next room with the door open keeps the safeguarding basics intact and lets the child forget you are listening. Stay closer for a child under six or seven, or for the first fortnight with a new teacher, and ask for a short summary at the door instead of listening in.

Four things, and none of them are rude to ask for. Meet the teacher yourself before the first session. Keep lessons in a shared space with the door open, never in a bedroom. Have a responsible adult at home for every session rather than only the first few. And require that all scheduling messages come to you and not to the child. Profiles on the platform are verified for identity and claimed qualifications before they go live, but that check sits alongside your own arrangements rather than replacing them.

Usually yes, provided you stay inside your own cluster. Pune supports local teaching around Koregaon Park, Kalyani Nagar, Viman Nagar and Aundh on one side and Baner, Balewadi, Wakad and Kharadi on the other, and crossing between them on a weekday evening is what breaks arrangements. Ahmedabad has real depth around Satellite, Bodakdev and SG Highway, with Gandhinagar close enough to share teachers. Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot are thinner, and hybrid often works better there.

Below about nine it usually does not, and the failure is hard to spot. The child looks attentive, the lesson sounds pleasant from the next room, and very little transfers, because attending to an adult on a screen while managing your own materials is two demanding tasks at once. From nine to eleven, thirty to forty minutes can work well for reading discussion or talking through writing. By early Middle Years Programme, online is a real choice rather than a compromise.

It is the child's own question, taken seriously, with a small piece of recorded work at the end. Measuring the balcony plants weekly and drawing the change. Counting how many buckets of water the household uses in a day. Writing four sentences on why the lift is quicker than the stairs. Connected to the unit of inquiry running at school where possible, which is why a good teacher asks the school what that unit is. What it is not is a second set of worksheets after a full school day.

The language changes before the difficulty does. In the Middle Years Programme every subject is assessed against four criteria, each scored 0 to 8, with the total out of 32 converting to a 1 to 7 grade, and an eleven-year-old is suddenly marked on how they investigate and how they communicate rather than only on whether they are right. Early MYP home teaching is mostly translation: turning criterion wording into something a child can practise, such as showing a pattern before stating a rule.

Behaviour shifts first, within four to six weeks: opening the book unprompted, rereading a sentence, saying that something is not understood rather than going quiet. Reading fluency moves across a term of daily practice. Writing quality takes longer than that, and number sense rebuilt from the foundations is realistically a year's work. No teacher can promise a reading age or a grade by a date. Judge the change in what your child does unaided, and keep a piece of their work from week one to compare against.

Ask for a different match, early. Fit at this age is mostly about pace and warmth rather than subject knowledge, and a teacher who suits a quiet ten-year-old may be wrong for a restless eight-year-old. Watch for reluctance on the day, silence afterwards, or a child who has stopped mentioning the teacher. Describe what did not work rather than simply asking for someone else, because the description makes the next shortlist better. There is no obligation to persist with an arrangement a child is unhappy in.

Back-to-back sessions with the same teacher often work well and save a family an entire evening of coordination. Teaching them together rarely does, unless the children are close in age and at a similar stage, because a shared session tends to be pitched to the older one while the younger copies. If the ages are three or more years apart, book two shorter consecutive sessions instead. Availability for consecutive slots depends on the teacher's schedule and your locality.

Often not, and it is worth asking before you book. If the school is not raising concerns, the child reads for pleasure, and homework happens without a nightly argument, there may be nothing to buy this year. A child of nine with four activities and no free evenings usually needs fewer commitments rather than another adult. The cases that genuinely justify paid help are a specific gap the class teacher has named, a mid-year move between school systems, or a child who has stopped attempting anything alone.