Private educational program - Newton, MA
Six students at a table, and a teacher who knows all six.
Ninebark Learning teaches reading and writing, mathematics, and study skills to students in grades 3–12. Everyone starts with a free assessment, works in a group of six, and keeps the same instructor for the whole twelve-week term.
- 6
- students per group, never more
- 2016
- the year the program started
- 92%
- of students moved up a full grade level in one term
- 12 weeks
- in a term, each one ending with a written review
Our approach
We find out what a student can already do, then start there
Every student begins with a free assessment: 75 minutes with an instructor, working through material until we can see exactly where the ground gets soft. Not a placement test, and not a guess from a grade level.
Then we tell you what we found in plain language, and what we would work on first. If we are not the right people for it, we say so and tell you who might be.
Groups are six students, never seven. Six is the number at which an instructor can hear every student think out loud inside 75 minutes, which is why nobody here spends an hour sitting quietly at the back.
What we teach
Reading & Writing
See the programsGrades 3–8. Decoding and fluency for a student who still reads slowly; comprehension, vocabulary and paragraph structure for one who reads fluently but cannot say what the page meant.
Mathematics
See the programsGrades 3–12, arithmetic through pre-calculus. We find the earliest idea a student is unsure of and start there, because everything after it leans on it, then work forward to this week's class.
Study Skills & Test Prep
See the programsGrades 8–12. Notes worth rereading, a plan for the week, and timed practice for the SAT, ACT and ISEE. These habits outlast the test by years.
Start with a free assessment.
Seventy-five minutes with your child, then a straight conversation with you about what we found, what we would work on first, and whether we are the right people for it. No charge, and no obligation to enroll afterwards.
Student stories
ReadingA fourth grader who hid from reading
Nora would do anything rather than read aloud: sharpen a pencil, ask for water, fall suddenly ill. We went back to decoding, where the gap actually was, and gave her books she could finish in one sitting. By the end of the second term she was reading ahead of her group and correcting her instructor's pronunciation.
MathA seventh grader who never finished fractions
Devin was failing pre-algebra, and the reason sat three years upstream. Six weeks on fractions, then back to the class material. He finished the year with a B and, more usefully, with the habit of asking which earlier idea a new one rests on.
Test prepA junior who froze on timed papers
Amara knew the material and lost it the moment a clock started. We spent a term on pacing, on leaving a question without losing the thread, and on what to do in the last ten minutes. Her practice scores moved; more to the point, she stopped dreading Saturday mornings.
What parents say
I had been told for two years that my son was just not a math person. The first thing Ninebark did was spend an hour finding out what he actually knew, and the first thing they told me was the specific thing he had missed in fourth grade. Nobody had ever put it that plainly. He is not a different child now, but he does his homework without an argument, and he can tell me what he is stuck on.
She used to take twenty minutes to get through a page and then not remember any of it. I noticed the change in the car, of all places: she read a billboard out loud, then the next one, then the back of a receipt she found in the door pocket. Nobody had asked her to. That was somewhere around week nine.
Two of mine go, one for math and one for study skills, and the part I did not expect to care about is the note that comes home on Friday. It is three or four lines, written by the person who was actually in the room, and it says what they worked on and where it got hard. I have had report cards that told me less.
He sat a full timed practice paper on a Saturday morning in October, and the next week his instructor went through it with him question by question - not the answers, the last ten minutes. When our hockey schedule moved in November, somebody called me to shift his group rather than waiting for us to notice the clash. Nobody had to chase it.
My daughter has an IEP and I have spent years explaining it to people who nodded and then taught her exactly the way they always had. Here I sent it over before the assessment and the instructor had read it - she asked me two questions about it that told me she had. It is a low bar and almost nobody clears it.
We did one term and stopped, because he had caught up and they said so. I had half expected to be told he needed another year of it. We came back the following spring for study skills, which is the only reason I can tell you they were right the first time.
About
Maren Okafor started this with one table and four students
Dr. Maren Okafor taught middle-school mathematics in public schools for eleven years before she opened Ninebark in 2016. What wore her down was not the students; it was a class of twenty-eight in which the three who needed her most were the three she reached last.
So she took two rooms on Walnut Street and taught four students at a time, in the evenings, after her own school day. There are four instructors now and the rule has not moved: six students to a group, and the same instructor for the whole term.