About
Why Comet Skills exists
School has a fixed number of hours and a great deal to cover. It teaches the core subjects well. What it rarely has room for are the skills that decide how far a student gets with everything else.
The thinking behind it
Ask most adults which skills have mattered most in their working life and you get a consistent list. Spotting an idea worth pursuing. Explaining it so people listen. Working out which tools to use and when to trust them. Staying with something long enough to finish it.
Almost none of that appears on a report card, and as software takes on more of the routine work, those abilities become more valuable rather than less. They are also learnable, at an age when learning them is easy.
That is what Comet Skills teaches. Four courses, each built around one of those abilities, for students in grades 3 to 8.
How we teach
Four things we hold to
Skills are practised, not explained
Students spend the hour making, testing and presenting. A class where a student listens for sixty minutes has taught them nothing they can use on Monday.
Small enough that nobody hides
Classes are small group or semi private, so every student speaks every week and gets feedback on their own work. Quiet students are the ones who benefit most, and the ones a large class loses.
Age changes the course, not just the pace
Every course runs at two levels. Juniors get more structure and shorter working blocks. Seniors get the harder version with the scaffolding removed. A grade 4 and a grade 7 should both find it demanding.
Alongside school, never against it
We are not a substitute for a classroom and we do not pretend school is failing. These courses cover ground the timetable does not have room for, which is a different job entirely.
Where the courses come from
We write curriculum for a living
Comet Skills grew out of curriculum development work. We design lesson plans, workbooks and teaching resources for schools and education organizations, and the same process sits behind every course here.
That means nothing is licensed from a franchise or bought off a shelf. Each course is built specifically for small live online classes, which behave very differently from a classroom of thirty, and it gets revised after every group we teach.
If your school or organization needs custom curriculum developed, that side of the work lives at k12curriculum.com.
How we work
What you can hold us to
We tell you what happens, not what it will achieve
Nobody can promise a child will be confident in ten weeks. What we can tell you is exactly what they will do in each class and what they will have finished with at the end.
You hear from us before the start date, either way
If a group has not reached its minimum we will say so in advance and offer the next term or a semi private slot instead. Semi private runs with as few as two students, so there is usually a way forward.
We will say when a course is the wrong fit
If it is wrong for their grade, or just wrong for right now, we will tell you and point you at something better. Sometimes that is a different course of ours, and sometimes it is not ours at all.
Every review here will be a real one
Comet Skills is new, so there are none yet. When families have something to say about their child's experience it will appear here, and not a day before.
Have a question about a course?
Tell us your child's grade and what you are hoping they get out of it, and we will recommend a course and a level.
Ask about a course