Planning Your Day 101

It is no secret that with the pandemic, many young children are faced with the difficult tasks of staying motivated and on track when all their educational activities take place on the computer screen where many other distraction lie in waiting to sap their energies. This book can be a useful tool to help kids in elementary or middle-school stay on track and learn the skill of planning. The book can facilitate a conversation between busy, tired adult caregivers and the children at home. It's not a substitute for that genuine, heart-felt connection but it can greatly assist in forming that relationship.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read a copy of this book!

Disclaimer that I am not a preteen and I don't have preteens in my life via family or work or volunteering, so I can't make any predictions about how the actual target audience will respond to the book. I, however, really enjoyed this as a millennial who's obsessed with productivity aids but also completely overthinks everything and needed a simple palate cleanser.

The book is visually appealing, colorful and chock-full of little pictures. It has a nice little structure, too. It takes a simple one- or two-word concept ("Move," "Create," "Tech Time") and first introduces the concept with some examples (under Move, things like riding a bike, dancing in your room, or swimming), then has a blank page with a bulleted list to be filled in with your favorite examples, then has a page where the activity is added to your own schedule, with an example schedule being slowly filled in off to the side. You add a little bit of everything throughout the day, and then at the end you fill in your favorite activities in any blank spaces so you get to do some extra.

At the beginning of the book, there are notes to adults and to preteens, and both audiences are reminded to be flexible. It would have been interesting to see some worked examples of "what if you can't do something you planned to do" because preteen me would have been very distraught (this is still a problem for adult me) but I guess that's outside the scope of this little 50-page book!

In any case, I enjoyed this cute little workbook as a back-to-basics lesson in time management that can remind adults like me that sometimes a schedule can be a way to remind you of things you enjoy and help you remember to do them, and productivity does not need to be a punishment.

Planning your time is a life skill. The earlier you can learn, the easier certain things in life will be. This is a great guide for older kids and pre-teens with extra work pages in the back.

My one criticism is that in the chapter about moving it mentions food as a reward, and this is not a healthy habit to develop.

Overall, an excellent beginner's guide to planning.

This planner is geared toward pre-teens but younger kids or even adults would also enjoy it. It's not exactly a planner, in the strict sense of the word. There aren't calendar pages or anything like that. It's more of an activity book that helps teach you how to plan and how to manage your time. This is the weekend and summer edition, so it focuses more on things you do that you enjoy, along with meal planning and chores. It's a simple concept and pleasantly presented. Pair it with an actual planner and you'd have everything you need to figure out how to manage your time.

(I would recommend a physical copy. It doesn't work well as an ebook.)

This is a nice tool to help preteens organize their lives at an early age. I like the format and think it will be beneficial to some to have it written.

My teen and pre teen read through this and we thought it was a very doable fun book with great ideas for them and even me to use on the weekends or during the summer or really any time you want to. I highly recommend this book to parents and their kids.

The book is divided into 8 main chapters with an Introduction and Extra Worksheets too. The main chapters are:
- Move
- Grow
- Create
- Meals
- Chill
- Contribute
- Tech Time
- Hang Out

To give a brief overview of a few chapters, the first chapter 'Move' is about doing physical activity, be that swimming, cycling, etc 'Growing' is not all about growing plants, it about growing your mind through various activities. The book contains lots of ideas like this throughout all the chapters and provides room for you to write your own ideas in.

As the chapters progress, there is an opportunity to create a schedule around each activity for the day. The extra worksheets at the rear allow you to have different schedules for different days of the week. This is handy for school days and weekends. However, there don't appear to be any chapters that suggest that you have to do homework, whilst rather boring at times it certainly would be important to get them in the habit of scheduling this time in especially when in high school (start from age 11 in the UK).

Overall this is a book that is aimed at preteens, though the language perhaps seems a little childish for this age group in my opinion. The illustrations are cute and the book is colourful.

I received this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

This is a great book about living each day to its fullest and not wasting a single moment. I think this will definitely help me get my life in order and start planning things instead of waiting until the last minute or forgetting to do things.