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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Introductory Workbook – Learn Day Crafting at your own pace

Here is the first in a new Apprentice Series of Day Crafting workbooks. This works as a standalone course or as a compliment to the Day Crafting Apprentice Course – or as a refresher if you’ve completed the Day Crafting Apprentice Course. Further workbooks are available here.

In this post you will find some photos from the workbook, a free sample to download containing a range of example pages and a link to buy the book.

Setting intentions – the Day Crafting tool you’ll use most

Have you heard of a stitching pony? Every craft has ubiquitous tools, the potter’s wheel, the smith’s anvil, the carver’s chisel – and the leatherworker has the stitching pony which is used to grip the material. To the Day Crafter the tool used most often has to be intention setting.

Reset your days to your internal clock

Imagine a clock that told you personally when it was your best time during the day to do certain tasks – such as the optimum time to do analytical thinking or to have a difficult conversation. The best time to eat carbohydrates or to drive or to have sex. This clock could be fairly specific and handle conditions, for example it could tell you when to exercise to perform at your best, or to lose weight or to raise your mood, or to build strength or avoid injury (each of these conditions would give a different time). It could give you a surprisingly long list of optimum timings – like the best time to make a sale or take medicine, to learn something, to drink alcohol, visit the dentist, solve creative problems and get out into the sunshine, to go first – or not, to work on through or to take a break. And unsurprisingly, when to get up and when to go to bed.