ICAS Maths in Year 2: The 84 Miles Earned by Staying Curious

Preeti Sakhuja met a Year 2 student who was already thinking past the method she was teaching. Miles had not been sent to her to catch up.

He scored 84 in ICAS Mathematics, sitting a paper built to reward reasoning rather than recall. Preeti has taught him through the year of online maths tutoring with Cuemath that led to it.

Most families arrive at a maths class because something has gone wrong. Miles's parents arrived with the opposite problem, which gets talked about far less. He already liked the subject, already asked why things worked, and what they were worried about was what usually happens next.

What usually happens next is that school catches up with the pace of the class rather than the pace of the child. A student who is ahead gets more of what they can already do, the questions stop being interesting, and the curiosity that made them quick in the first place quietly drains out. By the time it shows up in a result it has been gone for a while.

So Preeti did not spend the year consolidating. She kept his fundamentals solid, because a child who reasons well still needs the ground under him to be firm, and then she put questions in front of him that did not have an obvious route in. What she noticed was that he would go around the usual approach rather than through it. That is the habit an ICAS paper happens to reward, and it was not drilled into him. It was protected.

ICAS is an independent assessment sat by students across Australia and in a number of other countries, and it is deliberately not a test of the year's syllabus. The questions are written to need higher-order thinking, so a child who has memorised methods tends to stall on them while a child who reasons tends to find a way through. A score of 84 in Year 2 says that reasoning was already there. The useful part for his parents is that a year of coaching did not flatten it.

The hardest thing to give a curious child is more of what made them curious. Miles still asks why, now has the fluency to chase the answer himself, and goes at a problem from an angle nobody taught him. Protecting that, rather than repairing it years later, is how a Year 2 student ends up MathFit.

Other Cuemath students in Australia have kept the same thing alive. Dhruva earned a Fielder Award for confidence in Year 3, and Paavni went from silent in class to four A's in Year 4.