How to use Marker Sessions

1. What a session is

A session is one concept, taught through drawing, role-play, or a demonstration. Never a lecture. Every session has the same four parts:

• Setup teaches you the concept, properly and in full, so you can answer the questions your kid asks next.
• Walkthrough is the loose script for running it with your kid.
• Narrative is a worked example, a real back-and-forth, so you can hear what it sounds like before you try it.
• Pitfalls is what tends to go wrong in this specific session, and what to say when it does.

One rule runs through all of them: your kid has to guess before you tell them. That guess is what makes the idea stick.

One more thing about Narrative: it’s the highlight reel, not a transcript. Every question lands right when it should, every kid stays with it the whole way through, nobody goes quiet or drifts off at the wrong moment. No real session runs this smoothly, ever, in any category. If one of yours ever does, for real, email me and tell me how, because I have never once had it go this clean.

2. Get in

Go to the site and pick how you want an account:

• Email and password, at Sign up.
• Google sign-in, one click.
• Name and email only, no password, if you just want to read one session.

Five sessions are free to read as soon as you have an account. A subscription opens everything else.

3. Find your way around

Five things in the top bar, on every screen:

• Library: every session, grouped by category.
• Start here: the opening session of each category, when you do not know where to begin.
• Tutorial: this page, any time you want it again.
• Kids: a profile per kid, and the record of what you have run with them.
• Account: your subscription, your settings, and the light and dark toggle.

Under Kids and under Account there is a Saved line with two links: Favorites for sessions you starred, and Playlists for groupings you made yourself.

4. Read a session page

Open any session and you get the four tabs from step 1: Setup, Walkthrough, Narrative, Pitfalls. Tap or click between them. On a phone you can swipe.

Above the tabs you get what you need before you start: how long it takes, what materials to gather, usually nothing, and the session’s own diagram if it has one.

That diagram won’t look good. I can’t draw, and that’s the point: the idea gets across anyway, and yours will too.

Read Setup properly. It is the part that does the work. The other three tabs assume you have.

5. Run your own first session, alone

Before you run anything with your kid, run one on yourself.

Open the library and look for Your first Marker Session, at the top. It is called Heads, Tails, and Why the Coin Doesn’t Remember, and it takes about five minutes.

It is a real session, and you are the kid in it. That is the point. You learn the shape of a session by sitting on the receiving end of one, which is much faster than reading about it.

6. Run The Unstuck Machine with your kid

Now the first real one. From Start here, open The Unstuck Machine. About 24 minutes.

Run this one before any other session with your kid. It teaches the five moves for a kid who has gone quiet or stuck, and every session after it assumes you both have those moves. It is the one session that is worth doing in order.

7. Use Run Mode

On a session page, press ▶ Start Run Mode.

Run Mode strips the page down to one step at a time, full screen, so you are not scrolling and reading while also talking to a child. Move with the arrow keys or the on-screen buttons.

If your kid stalls, press 🧭 Kid stuck?. It gives you the specific move for this specific step, not a generic hint. That is the same set of guiding principles The Unstuck Machine taught you in step 6.

You do not have to use Run Mode. Reading the page works too. It exists because holding a phone and running a conversation at the same time is harder than it sounds.

8. Log it against your kid

At the bottom of the session page, mark it ✓ done for the kid you ran it with. If you have not made a kid profile yet, type a name there and it makes one.

If it did not land, mark it ↻ redo instead. It is a note to yourself to come back to it in a few months.

Use a first name or a nickname. Nothing else about your kid is needed anywhere on the site.

Once a session is logged, the kid’s page holds the record: what you have run, when, and any badges they have picked up along the way.

9. Keep what is worth keeping

Three ways to keep track, and you can ignore all of them:

• ☆ Favorite a session to find it again fast.
• Playlists group sessions you choose, for whatever reason you like.
• Paths are ready-made chains of sessions, built to be run in order.

Favorites and Playlists live under Saved, on the Kids and Account screens.

10. The extras

None of these matter for your first session. They are here so you know they exist:

• Print a session for a clean paper version of all four tabs.
• Light or dark appearance, in the top bar and on Account.
• Memories: draw a memory onto a logged session, from the kid’s page, so you have the thing your kid made and not just the date.
• Listen: have a section read aloud to you while your hands are busy.

11. Pick your own, and pick two

Now go where you want. The advice worth taking:

• Pick one session in a subject you know well.
• Pick one in a subject you do not.

The second kind is where you find out whether Setup taught you enough to teach from.

12. Where to go next

• Start here if you want the opening session of each category.
• Paths if you would rather follow a ready-made chain.
• The method if you want the reasoning behind all of this: how deep to read Setup, what to do when your kid goes off-script, and what Marker Sessions cannot do.
• Feedback if something is wrong or missing. It goes straight to us.