For parents of Years 3–6 kids · Australia

Some days homework is fine. Other days it’s a negotiation.

Short daily practice for times tables, NAPLAN numeracy and school spelling lists. Each item keeps coming back until your child gets it right across several sessions. The same spaced-review idea serious flashcard systems use, inside a game made for Years 3 to 6.

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It's quarter past seven on a school night.

The spelling list is on the fridge. The test is Friday. Your child spelt every word right on Thursday last week, and lost half of them by the Monday after.

Times tables are the same story. 7 × 8 was solid in the car yesterday. Tonight it's fingers under the table, then a guess.

If you're anything like me, you've tried the usual fixes. Worksheets, until they became a fight. A maths app, until you watched it serve an ad between questions. Flashcards, until you were the one holding them every night at 7pm.

None of it failed because your child isn't capable. Getting it right tonight doesn't always mean remembering it next week. Recall gets stronger when it's practised again, spaced out over days, so ONZU brings facts and words back for another go. Schools know this. It's the idea behind Leitner boxes and flashcard systems like Anki.

That's the entire idea behind ONZU.

What's underneath the game

Every times-table fact, every spelling word, every grammar item has its own private record. Weak items come back sooner and more often. Mastered items fade to occasional review.

Wrong answers cost nothing. No lost points, no lost streaks, no lives. Your child sees the correct answer, does it once properly, and the app quietly brings the item back sooner. The consequence of a mistake is more practice, not punishment.

And mastery has a hard rule: a fact cannot be mastered in one session. Getting 7 × 8 right ten times in one session moves it up one step, not ten. Reaching "mastered" takes correct answers across several separate sessions. That rule is there so one lucky session can't count as mastered.

Mastered means right in several separate sessions, not right once.

You watch it happen

Your child's Times Table Map shows every fact in their range as a coloured square, the whole grid at a glance: coral for tricky, amethyst for getting there, aqua for mastered. Tap a square and the next round quietly targets it.

Over the weeks you see which facts have turned aqua and which still need work.

Not tried yet Tricky Getting there Mastered

What your child actually practises

Maths

Times tables plus six more skills: missing-number equations, place value, fractions, data, chance and measurement. Mapped to the Australian Curriculum for Years 3 to 6, with a NSW syllabus mapping. Six of the seven numeracy areas in our NAPLAN guide are covered. Grids, coordinates and transformations are not, yet.

Spelling & grammar

Hear each built-in word in a clear pre-recorded voice (words you paste use your device's voice), type it. Homophones in context, punctuation, was/were. New words start with gentle recognition and graduate to writing unaided, because Friday's test is "hear it, write it".

High-school readiness

Optional for Year 6. Practice rounds for the move to high school: reading a real timetable, what to say when you're lost, packing from a diary. Strategies only. No mood tracking, no anxiety scores, no journalling, ever.

And where ONZU doesn't reach, it says so. Reading comprehension and extended writing are whole products of their own. I'd rather cover two NAPLAN domains properly than four thinly.

What makes it easy to start

Being right about the science is worth nothing if the app stays closed. Three things help with that.

An illustration of a starter Dragon, Egg to Mega. The real one is your child's to earn, and theirs alone.

A companion that grows from real practice

Five right answers earn a little care. Maths brings food, spelling brings toys. The practice and the care together grow the pet, one stage at a time. Fully grown, it moves onto the Megas Squad poster, and a new egg arrives. It never gets sick. It never dies. It never nags. Miss a week and growth simply pauses.

Handwriting, not just tapping

Handwriting Lab says the word and your child writes it on screen with a finger or stylus, not a keyboard. A miss means writing it out, then writing it again from memory. It's the closest thing to the Friday test a screen can offer, and the app never keeps the handwriting itself.

Bring your own words

Paste this week's list from school, up to 40 words, into a private family Word Pack and the same memory engine takes over. Then Test Day runs a school-style practice test: listen, type, check, with an optional 25-second pace. Nothing in it counts against your child's rewards, and every miss flows straight into practice.

And you see all of it: a progress page with every day of practice on a calendar, and the map, updating live.

The game part, honestly

The pets, coins and streaks exist for one reason: so a ten-minute session is something your child chooses. The rules behind them are published, and some were drawn as hard lines:

No ads in the app. We never sell data. We measure our own advertising through grown-up account activity, never children's learning data. How it works.
No notifications. The app never asks for permission to nag, so it has no way to.
No loot boxes, no pay-to-win. Coins buy cosmetics only, never progress or answers.
Nothing to buy inside the child's play loop. Billing lives with the grown-ups.
No punishment mechanics. Pets never get sick, never die. Neglect pauses growth, nothing more.
Rewards follow effort, not talent. The engine keeps every child near their own edge.

No real child names required, no child email addresses, no birthdates. Kids sign in with generated private names. You own the data and you download or delete it from the family account.

My QA team is in Year 4 and Year 6

ONZU started as a homework helper for my own two kids. Every feature shipped because it survived contact with two real children. Everything they got bored of was cut. They still use it, and it keeps getting better because of them.

Before you decide, read the honest guide

Most education apps ask you to trust the word "adaptive". I'd rather show you the machinery.

I publish a full parents' guide with the exact rules: how the spaced-repetition boxes work, the precise weighting the question picker uses, every reward formula, and a blunt privacy page. No hand-waving, nothing held back.

Read How ONZU Works →

If you read it and something doesn't sit right, closing this page is the right call. You know your child. Trust that reaction.

But if it matches what you've watched at your own kitchen table, the fastest way to know is to let your child play for a week and watch the map change colour.

What it costs, plainly

One plan, everything included: up to four children, unlimited practice, every Math and Spelling mode, Handwriting Lab with up to 40 handwriting checks per child a day (after that, or if the reader is unavailable, practice continues by typing), Transition Quest for Year 6, private family Word Packs with Test Day, and detailed progress reports.

The first 14 days are free, no card needed. After that it's $17 AUD a month, or $147 for the year (save $57 compared with 12 monthly payments), and around $2.80 a week for the whole family.

Founding families: FOUNDING97 is automatically applied to the first 100 eligible annual checkouts. There is no date deadline. You pay $97 for the first year. It renews at $147 a year after that.

It's priced by the year for the same reason the app works session by session: mastery is built over terms, not evenings.

Cancel anytime from the grown-up account, never inside a child's session. And if you stop, nothing is confiscated: your child's progress, pets and rewards are preserved.

Ready when you are

Create the family account, add your child, hand them the setup card. Ten minutes tonight. By next Friday the map shows where every fact they've practised stands.

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14 days free. No card needed. No automatic charge. After the trial, choose a subscription to keep practising. Progress stays saved.

PS. ONZU is not for every family. If your child needs help with reading comprehension or extended writing, this isn't the tool, and the guide says so plainly. It does one job: spaced daily practice for number facts, spelling and grammar.