School holiday Day Crafting primer for children

How can Day Crafting help your children structure their days when they're on holiday from school? Answering the question, 'What do you want to do today?' can be quite a cognitive challenge. My daughter is 10 and we're experimenting with this tool (which we've co-adapted) to provide some inspiration.

This quick exercise happens at the beginning of the holiday and the answers serve as prompts and structure to make skilled use of the time. During lock-down she learned how to schedule and time-box her days which was fantastic for family harmony and wellbeing – and scheduling is good for holidays too – they don't turn holiday days into mundane to-do list productivity, quite the opposite, the combined tools actually provide the structure for freedom and flow.

The Practice

In a notebook or on a page to stick on the fridge, generate answers to the following questions.

One big project
Two things to get better at
Three people to hang out with
Four local adventures
Five things to get totally absorbed doing
Six ways to help out around the house
Seven sensory pleasures, e.g. yummy foods

This can either become a tick list once you've done them or you can design progress bars to colour for the longer term items. Use your imagination.

Written by Bruce Stanley on Sat, May 29, 2021

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