A Job for Everyone

I have high ambitions.  Big ideas in my head of how a house smoothly runs, how children help and have ownership in the chores around the house, how happily they will help and pitch in.  I dream of being a disciplined, organized mom.  Because I'm so not that.

But, this year, I at least went to the effort of creating a "system" to help the kids learn to do little jobs around the house.  Actually, I didn't create it. I just made our own version based on the book "The Everyday Family Chore System" by Vicky Bentley.

Here are some pictures of what we've got up around the house and got the kids doing.  It comes and goes, but the five finger jobs every morning are consistently sticking around, which is a step in the right direction. : )


The kids each have five jobs they do every morning.  They get to wear these little clip on hands if they want to, until their jobs are done.  Their five morning jobs are: 
1. Make my bed
2. Get Dressed
3. Brush hair and teeth
4. Tidy my room
5. Job chart jobs

Then, I have a set of jobs they can do around the house.  Each week, they get two jobs. The jobs rotate so they don't get bored with them. And they're learning a lot about taking care of the house.  There is also one weekly job that just gets done once a week.  So this week, Luke's two house jobs are to rinse the dishes and help sort laundry.  Kiryn's are to set the table and sweet the kitchen and dining room.  Luke's weekly job is to help me wash windows.  And Kiryn's is to help me clean the TV cabinet. 



The first week we did this, they had great attitudes about it and were really helpful!  We gave them stars for doing a good job: 2 stars for first time obedience without complaining, 1 star for one reminder, and o zero stars if it took more than that, or if there was complaining.  At the end of the week, they got to redeem their stars for a trip to Baskin Robbins as a family to celebrate a good week of jobs! : ) 

I wish I could say I've been disciplined enough to keep this going every week.  It's kind of hit and miss, but something at least to work toward being consistent with over the course of the year.  : )



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commonplace Essays with Writing & Rhetoric

It bears repeating.  The Writing & Rhetoric series by Classical Academic Press is really amazing.  My 5th and 6th graders are in Ch. 5 of the sixth book. They are learning to write commonplace essays, which are six paragraph essays refuting bad character traits.  They wrote their first essay this week.  We were behind schedule, and weren't going to finish for class. I was fine with that and wasn't rushing them, but they both wanted to finish their essays for class so badly they stayed up late Thursday night in order to finish it. This is their first attempt at a commonplace essay. I was SO pleased with the results. They had minimal help with these! :) (These were typed as they were written. Any mistakes are not typos, but the kids' grammar and spelling errors.) :) Against Boasters by Kiryn Preedy (10 years old) Boasters cover up weakness by puffing up their deeds and can cause real harm. When boasters exaggerate things they have done, they don’t kno...
Read more

The Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric

Image
Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...
Read more

Picking Up Meryn!

Image
We made it to Ethiopia after a long day of travel!  We had a morning flight to Delhi, then a 15 hour layover, so we got to spend the day with some good friends in Delhi for the day.  We even got to sleep a few hours before going to the airport at midnight.  We had a very smooth process getting checked in and to our gate.  Kiryn was an amazing travel companion. I'm so thankful to have her with me. We left at 3 a.m. from Delhi, arrived a bit late in Addis, but had no line for a visa or immigration, got some money from the ATM, got our bags straight off the belt and found our driver outside.  Certainly, mercies from the Lord to make everything so easy. I'm not used to traveling alone... We got checked into the hotel, and hurriedly got a little unpacked, showered and changed, and I made all the 25 or so Thank You cards with tip gifts for the nannies to take to the care center. I got all of our gifts together for Meryn's nanny, Aynalem.  As soon as we went ...
Read more