Cardboard meets scissors. Before that, D2 pitches their designs to a D1 review board whose only job is to ask three hard questions - and the quietest person on each team does the talking. Team 2 goes up to Spark.
By 2:40 today every team has something boat-shaped, sized against an actual human being, with four sets of hands having touched it.
If one learner built and three watched, the team has a problem that Friday will expose. Intervene today.
The 20-minute size check happened. Nobody discovers their boat is too small on Friday morning.
The D1 pitch produced an actual design change. "Nothing" wasn't accepted as an answer.
Standard rhythm. Thinking Puzzle up by the cubbies.
Standard rhythm.
Talking points, not a script. Hit these in your own words - the studio can tell the difference, and the ones that land are the ones you actually mean.
The team going up today has four hours to think about it. That's better than four minutes. These aren't warm-up games - each is a situation a D2 learner is genuinely likely to hit in a Spark room. Running it at 8:30 lets it sit at the back of their head all morning, instead of being handed to them on the way out of lunch.
The situation (3 min) - tell them all of it up front. There is no hidden second half to this one:
“You're ten minutes into your afternoon upstairs. A Spark learner you've never met looks up at you and says: 'Can I go get a drink?'
He's asking you. Not his guide. You.
And here's the thing you don't know and can't know: whether he's allowed. Maybe he is. Maybe he's been in and out of that room all week and there's a plan about it. You're a visitor - you don't have the information, and you're not supposed to.”
Then the question that actually opens the conversation, and it isn't what do you say:
“Why do you think he asked you instead of his guide?”
Take a few answers. They'll get there: because you're new, because you're friendly, because he doesn't know your answer yet. That's not him being sneaky and it isn't a trap. It's a five-year-old working out what kind of person you are - and that's genuinely useful information for a role model to have about themselves.
The thinking (6 min):
The move (4 min) - land it on something they can say out loud:
The teaching underneath: being a good role model in someone else's room is mostly about knowing which decisions are yours. Saying "that's not mine to answer" isn't failing to help - it is the help, and it's the thing that makes the Spark guides trust you enough to keep inviting you back.
Nobody is being tested here and nothing is being withheld - if this starts to feel like a gotcha, the framing has slipped. The whole scenario is on the table from the first sentence, and the question is what a good role model does with incomplete information, not whether anyone got caught out.
If the studio lands on the move in ninety seconds, push outward rather than making it trickier: "Where else does this happen? Who asks you for things because they think you'll say yes?" Most of them will have a sibling in mind within seconds.
Today's briefing (5 min):
Two or three members of Team 1, five minutes flat, one question only:
"What should today's team know before they go up?"
This is a handover, not a debrief - it exists to brief the team who leave at 12:55, which is why it can't wait until the afternoon. The fuller three-question version happens at 3:10 Reflection, once today's team has been up and can answer it too.
Keep it tight. If it runs long it eats the dilemma, and the dilemma is the thing they actually need.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
This collab accompanies the quest rather than replacing it. Explaining your design to someone younger is the hardest communication test there is - you can't hide behind vocabulary, and you find out immediately whether you actually understand your own boat. D1 gets to be the expert in the room, which is a role they rarely get.
The format (35 min - it fits, but only just, so hold the timings):
Lunch and downtime, uninterrupted. Nothing is scheduled in this hour and nothing should be. The dilemmas run at 8:30 now, precisely so this stays clear.
12:55 - Team 2 leaves. The one exception, and it applies to the day's Spark team only. Everybody else stays at lunch until 1:00 as normal.
Remind Team 2 at the start of lunch, not at 12:54. They should be moving before the Spark learners do, so they arrive in position rather than into the middle of a transition.
12:55 - today's team leaves. Team 2 heads upstairs. They go up before the Spark learners move so they're already in position rather than arriving into chaos.
Their three jobs, in order:
Meanwhile in D2: everyone else runs D.E.A.R. as normal, 1:00–1:30. Nobody misses anything by going up, and nobody misses anything by staying.
Say it to the team on the way out, every single day: "You're not the guide. You're the role model. Notice, wait, and ask - don't fix.say this exactly" The failure mode for D2 this week is enthusiastic overstepping, and it comes from good intentions every time.
1:30 - Team 2 comes back down and writes while it's fresh. Twenty minutes, in the Spark journal, four questions. Same four every day so the entries can be read as a set on Thursday.
Guide moves: read over shoulders and push question two. Learners will write "Spark was loud" - that's an observation about Spark, not an answer. The question is what they found hard. "I got impatient" is the answer you're looking for, and it takes a prompt to get there.
Everyone else, 1:30–1:50: keep reading, or start hauling boat materials out so Quest opens with zero setup time. Quest is only 50 minutes and this week every minute of it counts.
First session with materials in hands. The teamwork skill on the table today is dividing work without abandoning each other - the failure mode is one learner building while three watch, and it looks like cooperation from a distance. Watch for four hands on cardboard, not one.
Before anyone touches cardboard (3 min) - the two build rules:
Jobs first (6 min):
Before anyone touches cardboard, each team writes four jobs on a card and puts a name against each. Give them the list to choose from:
Jobs rotate tomorrow. Say that now so nobody hoards the fun one.
Build (34 min):
Close (10 min):
Carry forward: Photograph every boat at the end of each session. On Friday the progression photos are half of what makes the day feel like an achievement rather than just a trip.
The first real cardboard mess of the week. Hold the build-zone standard hard today, because whatever you accept on Tuesday is what you'll have on Thursday.
Watch for callouts around the D1 pitch - specifically for whoever answered a hard question honestly instead of bluffing, and for whichever quiet learner did the explaining.
Today's team, in front of everyone, three questions. This is the debrief that used to sit in the morning launch - it works better here, because now the team has actually been up and the studio has watched them go.
Question two is the one that matters. If they say "nothing was hard," push once: "Nothing? You sat with a five-year-old for half an hour and every minute was easy?" The honest answer is usually near "I didn't know what to say" or "I wanted to just read it for them."
Five minutes is deliberately short - it forces answers rather than stories. Whatever surfaces here becomes tomorrow morning's briefing. If the D1 pitch is still on everyone's mind, "what did a D1 learner notice that you hadn't?" works well at Character Callouts instead.
Send-off by name.
Talking points for this week's email. Drop these into an AI assistant along with two or three live notes from your actual week - a name, a moment, something that surprised you - and it'll give you a draft in your own voice. The specifics are what make it land; the structure below is just the scaffolding.
The draft underneath is an example of the shape and the tone, not a template to send as-is. A parent who gets the same email as every other parent can tell.
Subject: Boat building has begun
Hi families,
Cardboard met scissors today. Every team now has something recognizably boat-shaped, and every team discovered at least one thing their drawing hadn't accounted for - several found out their boat was too small for a person only because we stopped mid-session and made them sit in it.
Before that, our D1 studio came in as a review board. Each D2 team pitched their design and D1 learners asked three questions each. The rule was that the quietest person on each team did the explaining, and that "you'll understand when you're older" was banned. Every team left with a change to make.
Today's team also had their afternoon with the Spark learners. They come back and write about it - specifically about what they found difficult, which is a harder question than it sounds.
Still very much accepting large cardboard boxes.
- [your name]