Tuesday, September 04, 2018

Chore Chart


Thanks for all of your great ideas on the What's Working post! It was fun and positive to think about some of the things that are serving us well in life right now!

You can click here to download a copy of this document, it should be a Word doc that you can edit for your own use.

Ok, so this was the result of a lot of frustration - as I thought over the summer, I tried to take all of these main areas of struggle and roll them into one chart. A few words of explanation - the top three rows are one row per child. They rotate taking turns helping David greet on Sunday mornings at church so whoever is the greeter is on the top row and they rotate down the rows until it is their turn to greet again. This solves one of my issues which was that they were tired of always doing the same chore - this way it rotates one week at a time so it keeps things interesting and if there is a chore they don't like, at least they only do it for a week at a time.

Another struggle we were having is who started the laundry. I've had them in charge of their own laundry for a while but it was always fairly nebulous - kids laundry day, someone needs to start it. No one wanted to start it and honestly, what mom can remember whose turn it is - so I just put it on the chart to help myself out - no more wondering who's going to do it!

Similarly, our ice maker stopped working a couple of years ago - it has been an ongoing thing to get the ice emptied yet each of my children LOVE ice and use a lot of it. Assigning turns has simplified this greatly and we always have ice!

None of these things might be a huge deal alone but grouped all together, it was really wearing me down dealing with these seemingly small things that became big every day.

Home Blessing Hour is a Fly Lady idea! This is once a week on Wednesdays and similar to the top three rows, these three rows correspond to your placement on the top three rows chores. If you help Daddy greet, you are on the top row of Home Blessing chores that week and so forth.

I knew I would need some ways of enforcing this {consequences} but also wanted to offer some positive reinforcement {blessings}. This has really made this so much more successful than just a list of chores. I can't think of consequences and blessings on the fly and have them work consistently, that just adds more to me and that is what I'm trying to minimize. So, having these pre-set makes it so easy.

Our chart is laminated so I just write ERS next to their assignments for the week and then am able to give consequences and blessings the same way. The only blessing we are still tweaking is earning a whole day of no chores, only one child has reached it once but it is hard because who does the extra work - Mom? Still thinking on that one - but the other things have been very successful.

This is what is working for us right now, I know it won't work forever but again, for now - it has been a huge help and taken a lot of the daily questions off of me. I do also assign one chore per day except Wednesdays when we have our Home Blessing Hour chores. The daily chore is usually something that can be done in about 5 minutes and involves dusting one area or wiping down the window by the front door or something like that. Those tasks come from either the Fly Lady zones/missions for the week or from something I've noticed that needs to be done.

What has helped you in getting chores and daily struggles streamlined?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love the chart! Well thought out and easier on mom.
Do you think a favorite meal would work instead of
no chores? Maybe have a list of their favorites from
which to choose. That way you can't have a request
for Beef Wellington or some such ;)

Mom said...

So glad this is working for you!!