Ready Kids › Home Alone Ready › Badge 3 › Lesson 3.1

Grades 4–5 · Home Alone Ready · Badge 3

The routine

Run the four-step arrival routine without having to think about it.

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Step 1 of 9

1Watch

Twenty minutes, sped up

Film

Twenty minutes, sped up

A kid comes in and the film runs fast: bag down, fridge, sofa, remote. It slows and stops on the front door behind her, still on the latch.

20 seconds

She has had a normal afternoon. One thing did not happen. Watch it again and find it.

2The idea

Boring on purpose

Lock. Message. Eat. Sit down. That is the routine. It is four steps because four is what you will remember on a day you have had a row at school and it is raining.

On a good day you would do all of it anyway. The routine is not for good days. A routine you do not have to think about is the one that holds on a bad day. You build it on the good days so it is there when you need it.

3The idea

What each step is for

Lock: door behind you, chain on, before the bag comes off.
Message: Home is enough. A parent reads one word and a clock stops in their head.
Eat: something cold, or whatever your family agreed. You make worse decisions hungry.
Sit down: five minutes, doing nothing.

The sitting is the step people skip. It is when you notice whether anything is off: a smell, a sound, a Feeling Dial that is not on Fine. Five minutes of nothing is how you find out the afternoon is normal.

4The idea

Maya, on a bad day, twice

Maya comes in, kicks the door shut, it does not latch. Bag on the floor. Straight to the fridge. Twenty minutes later her phone buzzes: you home?? She forgot. The door was on the latch the whole time.

Same Maya, same mood, with the routine. Her hand locks the door because her hand always does. Home goes from the hallway. She is just as fed up. The house is locked and her mum’s clock has stopped. The routine works because it does not ask how your day was.

5Order it

Put the four steps in order

Interactive

Lock, message, eat, sit

Four cards, shuffled. Tap them into order. When it is right, the routine plays at normal speed, from the door to the sofa, with a clock in the corner.

Watch the clock. The whole routine is under three minutes. The sitting down is most of it.

6Decide

You have come in and locked the door. Your phone is on two percent. What is the message?

Right. Two percent is enough for four letters. The message is the step that stops a clock in a parent’s head, and it does that at any battery level. Then charge it, on a desk, not the bed.

The message is not a report. It is a clock-stopper. A proper message in ten minutes is ten minutes of a parent not knowing. And nobody can see that you are not out. One word, now, then everything else.

Pick one to carry on.

7Say it

The message, out loud

Say it as you would type it

“Home. Door's locked.”

Four words. It goes from the hallway, before the bag is off.

8Find them

Which of these belong in the first twenty minutes?

Tap the ones that count.

Find all 4.

9Do it

Before you leave this page

Do the whole routine tonight, timed. Start the stopwatch when the door shuts, stop it when you sit down. Tell a parent the number.

Tick it when you have done it.

Lesson done.

Lock. Message. Eat. Sit down. Same order, every day.

Next lesson: Locked means locked

Badge 3 · The First Twenty Minutes

3.1The routine 3.2Locked means locked 3.3What you are allowed to do ★Badge Challenge

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