30-Day Prep Plan — A Calm Week-By-Week Roadmap For Level 1

Most children who underperform in an Olympiad are not short on ability. They are worn out by the wrong kind of preparation: a pile of mock papers, a tense weekend of cramming, and a running commentary on the score.

There is a calmer way, and it takes about thirty minutes a day. Here is how we would spend the four weeks before the exam.

A quick word on the thirty minutes. Short and daily beats long and occasional every time, because it keeps the pressure low and the habit alive. If your child is happy to do more on a given day, wonderful, but never let it become a chore. The moment prep feels like punishment, it stops working.

Week 1: Understand The Paper, Don't Score On It

The first week has one job, and it is not practice. It is to make the paper feel familiar instead of frightening.

Sit down together with one paper and no timer. A past paper or a practice paper both work, and what matters most is that the questions are new to your child. Olympiad questions are spread across dozens of workbooks and past sets, so it is easy to accidentally reuse ones they have already seen, which tells you nothing about their real gaps. Read the questions aloud. For each one, your child marks it green if it looks easy, amber if it needs a think, and red if they have no idea where to start. That is the whole exercise. No answers required, no marks counted. If you are using our practice set, this is the job for Paper 1, and the first paper is free, so it costs nothing to begin.

When you are done, look at where the reds cluster. If four of them sit in measurement, that is your map for the month. You have just learned more about your child's real gaps than a graded mock would ever tell you.

Week 2: Fix The Two Biggest Leaks

Now resist the urge to fix everything. Pick the two topics with the most reds, and spend the whole week on just those two. Two, not five.

Work little and often. Start each topic with a worked example so your child sees how a strong solver thinks, then try a few similar questions together, then a few alone. The aim this week is not speed or volume. It is the quiet click of "oh, I get it now" on the two things that were scaring them most.

If reasoning or visual questions are in that weak pair, practise them with real figures on the page. A mirror-image or direction question makes no sense described in words, and a child who has only read about them will meet the real thing for the first time in the exam hall.

Week 3: The First Timed Run

This is the week the clock comes in. Sit one full paper under real conditions: the whole thing, in one sitting, timed. Use a fresh paper for it, Paper 2 in our set, so the questions are genuinely new.

Be realistic about what this run is for. A Level 1 paper is a test of stamina as much as maths, thirty-five layered questions inside sixty minutes, and the first time a child meets that, the ticking clock alone can rattle them. So treat this as a baseline, not a verdict. You are finding out how their pace and focus hold up across a full hour, not expecting them to have the clock mastered yet.

One run rarely settles the nerves on its own, and that is fine. It is why there is a second, calmer timed attempt built into Week 4. If the clock clearly unsettles your child, add a few short timed bursts of ten questions between now and then, so the pressure becomes familiar in small doses rather than all at once.

The debrief matters more than the mark, so go gently and be a coach, not a judge. Look for patterns rather than the total. Which questions were rushed? Which silly mistake showed up twice? Was a whole section left short of time? Did an answer come out in centimetres when the question asked for metres? Those repeat errors are the cheapest marks your child will ever win back.

Week 4: Mix It Up, Then Ease Off

In the final week, alternate two kinds of day. One day, a fresh topic to keep things interesting. The next, a mixed bag of a dozen questions drawn from everywhere, so nothing feels out of the blue on exam day. Paper 3 works well as one of those mixed-bag days early in the week, and Paper 4 makes a second, more relaxed timed run midway through. Keep Paper 5 in your pocket, and only reach for it if your child is enjoying the rhythm and asks for one more.

Then, in the last two or three days, ease off. No new topics, no long sessions, no late-night drilling. A tired child underperforms a rested one every time. The job now is confidence, not cramming.

That mapping is deliberate. Our practice packs come as five papers per level, which is exactly enough for this plan: one to explore untimed, one timed mock, two in the final week, and one spare. The first is free, so you can start today and see how the rhythm feels before buying the rest.

What A Thirty-Minute Session Looks Like

You do not need a lesson plan. A simple, repeatable shape works well:

• Five minutes warming up, recalling yesterday's idea out loud.
• Twenty minutes on the day's focus, whether that is a new topic or mixed practice.
• Five minutes going back over anything that went wrong, out loud, in your child's own words.

That last five minutes is the part most families skip, and it is the part that actually moves the needle.

Four Traps To Avoid

• Starting with a stack of timed mocks. That teaches panic before it teaches maths.
• Chasing the score every day. It stops being fun, and fun is what sustains four weeks of effort.
• The weekend cram. Two long sittings do less than seven short ones, and they cost far more goodwill.
• Skipping the reasoning and figure questions because they feel unfamiliar. Those are exactly the ones worth the time.

Four weeks of this will not turn an average child into a topper. What it will do is far more useful: send a calm, prepared, quietly confident child into the exam, one who has met the paper before and is not afraid of it. That is worth more than any last-minute scramble for marks.