Schedule and Chore tips



calendar



I thought I would do a post on how I kept our family's schedule and chore chart organized.  With a family of 7 people, it is a must.  I miss those days (sometimes) when we were a family of three and my husband went to work and I stayed home and played with the baby all day and hardly anything on the schedule!  But that has changed as we have added kids and the kids have aged.  They get more activities to keep track of as they get older.  The first thing I have to help me keep organized is a great big calendar on my wall.  If anyone has an activity or appointment, they write it on the calendar (or they tell me so I can write it on the calendar.)  Once a week, usually on Sunday, we have a family council and we go through each child and both parents and go over everyone's schedule for the week.  The other thing that helps me is the big blackboard that my sister-in-law, Stephanie got us for Christmas.  I write on there important points of the weekly schedule and also the kids' weekly jobs.

A couple of years ago, we really didn't have chore assignments.  My husband and I would just ask different kids to do jobs and we would just assign them randomly.  We did try a schedule for washing the dishes...the two older kids and Scott and I would usually do them once or twice a week (rotating).  Then when Aidan turned 8, we decided to include him in the job rotation and we changed the job assignments.  We took four jobs-floors (all floors in the house, whether they need to be mopped or vacuumed), laundry (everyone's laundry!), dishes (includes setting the table and cleaning the counters) and the last job is both or our bathrooms.  We would assign everyone their job for 3 monthes and then rotate.  We did this for awhile but because they had the job for so long, sometimes it didn't get done very often.  So now we have the job assignments to weekly and it seems to work better and the house is a little cleaner.  The kids are also expected to keep their rooms clean.  The kids have done a pretty good job keeping up on their jobs but more often than not, they find evidence that the dish fairy or laundry fairy has been visiting!  it is interesting the different systems that we do to try and teach our kids work and to also keep our houses clean.  When my kids were young, I used to just clean the whole apartment (and later my house) just by myself.  I find that is just impossible to do it all myself now.   What systems works for you?