Singapore Math Drills Team · 27 October 2026
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In a dark room lit by one desk lamp, an intense Mastermind in a beanie briefs his Partner on a secret scheme. "Every day we go in. Five questions. Just five." The Partner, holding a juice box, is not impressed. "...Five?" The Mastermind leans in: "So easy it's basically cheating."
That is the set-up of The Heist, the first episode of our new comedy series, The Mastermind. Watch it first (it is under a minute), then read on for why the joke works, and why the "secret plan" is one of the most useful habits a family can build.
By the end of the video the plan has worked. The vault swings open, and inside is not gold but a ratio word problem, solved calmly. The Partner delivers the punchline: "That's not cheating. That's just practising." The Mastermind: "Keep your voice down."
The Mastermind's scheme has three parts, and each one is sound advice:
Five questions a day is not a magic number. It is simply small enough that "Shall we do our five?" is an easy question to say yes to, and large enough that real thinking happens. The point is the rhythm, not the count.
Cramming feels productive. After an hour on one topic, the method is fresh, the answers come quickly, and everyone feels the work has been done. The trouble is that "easy right now" and "remembered next month" are not the same thing.
People who study learning and memory have described two well-established effects that explain why the Mastermind's plan works:
Five questions a day puts both effects to work without extra planning. Every session is a small retrieval exercise, and the days in between provide the spacing. Mixing in an older topic now and then adds a third benefit: your child practises choosing the right method, not only carrying it out.
There is a gentler benefit too. A short, predictable session has less room for tears, bargaining and frustration. When practice is calm and finishes on a good note, it is much easier to come back to the next day.
If you would like more on why children forget methods they understood last week, our guide to spaced review and the forgetting curve goes deeper.
As the vault opens, the narration says: "...And then one day, the hard ones get easy." It is a comic line, but it describes something real. A problem that looks hard is usually built from smaller skills your child has already met. When each of those pieces has been practised many times, the whole problem starts to feel familiar.
Here is the problem from inside the vault, a Primary 5 ratio question.
Siti has red and blue beads in the ratio 2 : 3. She has 40 more blue beads than red beads. How many beads does she have altogether?
If your child is in Primary 5 or above, let them try it before reading the steps.
A ratio of 2 : 3 means that for every 2 equal parts of red beads, there are 3 equal parts of blue beads. In a bar model, each equal part is called a unit. Draw red as 2 units and blue as 3 units, with every unit the same length.
Red [ unit ][ unit ]
Blue [ unit ][ unit ][ unit ]
|<-40->|
Line the bars up from the left. Blue is longer than red by exactly one unit, and the question says blue has 40 more beads than red. So that extra unit is worth 40 beads.
3 units − 2 units = 1 unit, and 1 unit = 40
Altogether there are 2 units of red and 3 units of blue, which makes 5 units.
5 units = 5 × 40 = 200
Siti has 200 beads altogether.
Red is 2 × 40 = 80 beads and blue is 3 × 40 = 120 beads. Blue has 120 − 80 = 40 more, which matches the question, and 80 + 120 = 200. Dividing both 80 and 120 by 40 gives back the ratio 2 : 3.
Look at what this question needed: drawing two bars and comparing their lengths, seeing that "40 more" matches one unit, and multiplying by 5. Comparing bars is familiar from earlier word problems; "find 1 unit, then find the rest" is the core of the bar model method; and the arithmetic is a times-table fact.
A child who has met each of those pieces a few minutes at a time, across many days, sees this question as a short chain of familiar steps. Meet all of them at once for the first time, and the same question looks like a wall of words. Often the difference is not ability but how many times each piece has been practised. Our parent's guide to bar models walks through more of these step by step.
You do not need a timetable or a reward chart. A few small habits are enough:
We built the app around the same quiet plan as the video, so the habit takes less organising from you:
If you would like five-a-day material away from the app, our Daily 5 Shorts on YouTube each set five questions for a Primary level, and companion posts on our blog walk through the worked solutions.
Five a day. Nobody has to know.
Try a free interactive Primary 5 worksheet and see how calm practice feels, with no signup or credit card required.