Ideas for Principle #1

💡 Pizza is easier to hold and eat once you cut it into triangles.

A birthday cake can be sliced so you can treat every child who came to celebrate with you.

Is your room a mess?!
And you don't know where to start tidying it up?
The way to do it is to think about how to break this problem down into smaller parts.

If we break the room down into small parts 
* the play corner
* the bookshelf
* the clothes closet

We can tidy the room easily, because everything will have its own place and we can tidy it in parts.
Start with the toys,
then keep tidying the books on the bookshelf,
and finish by folding the clothes into the closet and placing them on the shelves.

When you break a big problem down into small parts, you can overcome it easily and quickly.

The same is true when we feel emotionally overwhelmed and can't think of ways to calm down.
If we break our feeling down into parts, we can understand what we're feeling right now and how to find our calm place. 

Ready for a challenge? We've prepared some extra challenges for you to try

Try going on a short walk around the house right now and look for one more thing that can be broken down into smaller parts to make it easier to deal with. Maybe the toy closet, maybe the sock drawer. Who finds one first?

Easy
1. Look together at the toys in the living room and find one toy that comes apart into several pieces. Can you take it apart and put it back together?
2. Ask your child: if we had to pack one small suitcase for a day out, what parts would we divide the things into inside it?

A bit of a stretch
3. Choose a closet or a drawer at home together and try to split its contents into three different groups, then tidy each group separately.
4. After tidying a room in parts, check together how long it took to tidy each part, and compare whether it was faster than trying to tidy everything at once.

Challenge for champions
5. Ask your child to invent their own breakdown guide, a drawing or a list, explaining how to divide a big task they need to do, like homework or packing for a trip, into three small steps.
6. Try together to find an example of breaking something down that really helps, for instance how an orchestra divides a song among different instruments, or how a movie is divided into scenes, and talk about why it helps.