Then you get home and start to make the charts, create the checklists, and hold the family meeting…and you suddenly have questions. A lot of questions….

Wowsie, I remember those days twenty-five and thirty years ago…like yesterday. (I’m so grateful that I remember so many happy memories associated with our thirty-two years of homeschooling!)

Well, this post is for those times. I recently did a 32 Scheduling Tips From 32 Years of Homeschooling presentation. Afterwards, I received emails and FB messages with those nagging questions that mamas get when they are going home and trying to implement something they just learned…

So consider this the follow up to the speaker that you heard and got so excited about. We all need that sometimes! 🙂

Love and hope,
Donna

P.S. Find other chore podcasts here.

The post Q&A Morning Routines, Chores & More! appeared first on Character Ink.

Pin these Chores for Tweens on Pinterest!

Click here for colorful, printable chore lists for toddlers through tweens.

If you want more chores, efficiency, and organization help, check out the podcast episodes listed here.

The post Age Appropriate Chores for Tweens [Pinnable Image] appeared first on Character Ink.

In teaching children to become diligent workers, there is much training involved. However, there comes a point in the teaching of each new task where a job becomes that child’s job. The child has been taught, and he is ready to take the diligence to the next level—responsibility.

Throughout the chore-training process, there are times in which intense training is needed to ensure that the child knows how to do the tasks that are going to be assigned. This involves a lot of working with Mom or Dad. Their modeling, instruction, patience, and encouragement will go a long way in teaching the child to complete the task fully.

So when is time to let the child go solo? How much time is too much working together? What jobs are good for the child alone, and what jobs are best done together with parents and/or older siblings?

These are tough questions, but I will leave you with these thoughts on the matter:

a. Any job that is above the child’s small or large motor skills should never be assigned as an independent job. It might look cute that an eight-year-old can trim the hedges, but it is unwise. Never give a child a job that is above his skill level, decision-making level, wisdom level, or physical capabilities.

b. A job that is too dangerous or too difficult can still be done with the parent. This is how all internships and job training later in life will take place. The parent trims the hedges, and the child gathers the droppings and bags them. During this process, the child watches the parent work safely with dangerous equipment. He watches the parent make decisions about how far to pull the cord on an electric trimmer or how deeply to cut the branches. All of these insights will help the child in the future.

c. Do all training in increments. Never assume that simply showing the child how to load the dishwasher as full as possible without over-loading makes the skill learned. Let the child watch you on the job as you explain it. Then work together on it.

d. Continue working together on jobs that are discouraging to the child. Kids can get overwhelmed with too large of messes. Stacks of dishes can be disheartening for a little dish doer. Five fold up loads instead of the normal two in one day might just seem like more of the same to us—but to a child, the mountain can feel insurmountable. These are instances in which jumping in teaches the child many additional skills—prioritizing large work loads, organization, thoroughness, and more. It also encourages the child not to give up—and that you have his back.

e. Daily jobs are good jobs to teach and then give to kids. They are repetitive. The opportunities to get better and better at them are plenty. They are predictable. The child starts to know just how long certain jobs take. They become second nature to the child. Dishes, daily laundry, trash, picking up, wiping down bathrooms, sweeping, and other daily tasks can be put into the daily chore schedule and completed without much effort when the work is divided among family members, and each child is fully equipped to complete their jobs.

f. Be sure to always work together on new tasks. This includes seasonal things and other jobs that the child might not have opportunity to do often enough to get really good at them. Gardening, yard work, spring cleaning, freezer cooking, monthly cleaning and organizing tasks are all good “work together” jobs. We did these on what we called our “big work days.” Everybody knew what that meant (and at the end of the day, we did fun family activities together!).

g. Never give a child jobs with harmful chemicals (or again, dangerous tools). Use a spray bottle with dish soap and water to teach young children to spray and wipe down surfaces. Start a child’s potato and apple peeling instruction with children’s safety knives. Another nice thing about starting with daily work for kids’ assignments is that they often just involve regular things that are less dangerous—dish soap, laundry soap, broom, spray bottle and cleaning rags, toilet brush (often no cleaner is needed for daily toilet maintenance), etc.

Balance the jobs you do together and the ones that are assigned. Always be teaching and training. And work together as a family to help build family unity. Chores are the foundation for diligence, resourcefulness, responsibility, thoroughness, and more later in life! Balance of independent work vs. working with you.

The post Children & Chores: Creating A Balance of Independent Work Vs. Working With You appeared first on Character Ink.

Pin these Chores for Elementary Children on Pinterest!

Click here for colorful, printable chore lists for toddlers through tweens.

If you want more chores, efficiency, and organization help, check out the podcast episodes listed here.

The post Age Appropriate Chores for Elementary Ages appeared first on Character Ink.

Welcome to another Wondering Wednesday!

Because we are swamped writing and editing our new Peter Pan and Jungle Book writing books. And because we have had a lot of great posts, freebies, etc., about chores, I thought I would do a sort of round up for you today of podcasts that might help you with chores, schedules, home management, and more!

So here you go….

PODCASTS FOR CHORES AND MORE

You can download our cute printable posters, “Age Appropriate Chore Posters”  at our store by clicking on the picture below!

Let me know what you would like to hear more about and how we can help you!

Love and hope,
Donna

The post Podcast Roundup: Chores & More appeared first on Character Ink.

One thing that makes it much easier for children to learn chores and household upkeep is for the children to work with you on developing systems. We as moms have a tendency to create the systems that we like in freezers, refrigerators, pantries, toy shelves, bookcases, kitchen cupboards, and more. And then when somebody comes in to do a chore or unload groceries or put something away, it is not done correctly. And we wonder why people keep messing up our systems!

In reality, rather than simply telling children where things go or how you would like things done, a lot of stress is eliminated when you include the children in developing the system. When I was about to reorganize the pantry, I would have at least one child working with me, if not more. As we organized the pantry, sometimes using ideas from the child, whoever was helping me was learning the system from the ground up. When it was time for the child to help put away groceries, it was easier to handle that job correctly. Also, the child learns valuable organizational skills including prioritizing space, utilizing areas to their fullest, considering sizes and stack- ability of products, and more.

When it was time to work on toy shelves, the entire crew and I would sit down and get busy. We would label the shelves together. We would discuss how the Legos will be stored. We made tubs of things together. And the next thing we knew, we had a workable system that the children could maintain. Thus, whenever the chore to “organize the toy shelves” was given, all of the children knew how to do that.

The systems can extend to the kitchen as well. If you always make biscuits and gravy or you always make pancakes, initiate a system for doing those jobs. Type the recipes up clearly. Always have ingredients on hand. Teach the children from start to finish how to handle those jobs thoroughly, and by involving the child in the system, is ready to take it on himself.

We have a tendency to think in the here and now. It would be easier for me to make the pancakes—and much faster—than for me to have a child help me. Or it would take more time to do it with the kids. However, we are not thinking long term when we think like this. We are not thinking of how much family unity and family efficiency we could have by chore training. We are not thinking of our children’s futures—and how we can equip them right here and now, beginning with three year olds putting their room time toys away.

I believed in this from day one with my kids (thanks to thorough training from Dr. Raymond Moore and Gregg Harris), and my kids are all reaping the benefits of this approach today as they (seventeen through thirty-three) excel in their jobs, homes, marriages, and school. Skill-building, and life-skill-building specifically, is a huge part of parenting—and one that we should take seriously as we teach our kids to become diligent workers in home and school.

The post Children & Chores: Create Systems Together appeared first on Character Ink.

Pin these Chores for Kindergarteners on Pinterest!

Click here for colorful, printable chore lists for toddlers through tweens.

If you want more chores, efficiency, and organization help, check out the podcast episodes listed here.

The post Age Appropriate Chores for Kindergarteners appeared first on Character Ink.

This post is a continuation of the “Age Appropriate Chores Series”. You can read previous posts by clicking here.

Speaking of a sense of accomplishment and pride, we found it much more effective to actually give a child a certain chore, certain area, a certain jurisdiction rather than passing out chores each day, using a job jar, etc. What I mean by this is that we taught a child to do a chore completely, and that naturally became that child’s job.

So when a child learned to unload the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher became their job. It wasn’t something he helped with. It wasn’t something he did on occasion. It wasn’t something that he did if Mom wasn’t there to do it. It became his.

This doesn’t mean you do not change jobs and pass them out differently after a while. It simply means for whatever period of time you designated this task, whether it is washing, drying, folding, and putting away a load of laundry every day or unloading the dishwasher and setting the table for dinner every day, it is yours.

As your children grow in age and developmentally, you teach them more and more skills, and they are able to add more and more chore. I can remember my children anticipating each new season as they got to move up into “harder” chores—and their “lesser” chore moved down to a younger one. It was a rite of passage to move up into laundry and out of dishes or into assistant chef for dinner and out of laundry. When it comes to chores, keep in mind the biblical admonitions that “to whom much is given, much is expected” and “to add a little at a time, precept upon precept.”

As an aside to this point, I can remember when our youngest was about seven or eight, and he learned laundry. It was so excited to move up to a bigger chore—and relished the thought that his dish days might soon be behind him. When the day came for him to take over two loads of fold up laundry from start to finish each day, he wanted to know who was going to take his dishwasher unloading and reloading twice a day.

When we explained that nobody was—he was keeping that and adding the fold up laundry, his little face was priceless. “You mean there’s nobody taking my dishes now?”

I told him that Daddy did dishes every day for the past twenty-five years, and he was much pretty doomed to dishes for fifty or sixty years if he was a good husband some day!

Of course, in addition to building skills and character in your children, this is a real boost to the family. Imagine, if you are not currently operating in this protocol of chores, that you have four children, ages six, eight, ten, and twelve. And tomorrow morning when you get up, and you are doing phonics and oral reading with your six-year-old, that day’s laundry, dishes, trash, and breakfast preparations are all being done – completely, thoroughly, and consistently. What freedom this provides for a busy mother! And what family unity it builds when the family works together in this way.

Then, breakfast is over, and when you have a language arts meeting with the two older children, the eight-year-old and six year-old children clean the kitchen, load the dishwasher and run it, wipe the kitchen down, and sweep the floor. All that happened because the appropriate training took place, and chore sessions were implemented.

I really feel that giving full responsibility of certain chores to children is paramount in helping children become independent workers and responsible. It is easy to do something when you are asked to do it, but it is character building and life-skill-giving to be responsible for something solely.

*For a complete list of all ages and appropriate chores (including Working With Someone Else lists), see our Age-Appropriate Chores Poster Pack.

The post Chores: “Give” Kids Entire Responsibility When Possible appeared first on Character Ink.

Pin these Chores for Preschoolers on Pinterest!

Click here for colorful, printable chore lists for toddlers through tweens.

If you want more chores, efficiency, and organization help, check out the podcast episodes listed here.

The post Age Appropriate Chores for Preschoolers appeared first on Character Ink.

Once the training of the chore is completed, the fun part of actually having someone consistently and correctly do the job begins. This will work out much better if you have set up a certain protocol that is followed to be sure that the chores that you have taught are actually completed and completed when needed.

We personally had three chore sessions a day before each meal for twenty minutes or so. We learned this approach from Greg Harris in his early Christian Homeschool Workshop (twenty-five years ago!) where he taught us to attach important things in our day to something that is already in the schedule. It felt natural to add a chore session before each meal.

This worked well for us because we had one person, Mom in the beginning, fixing meals during that time. When we added a chore session to that, it meant that everybody was working at the same time on various areas. It also meant there was a a starting point and an ending point.

Some families prefer to simply have a chore chart in which all the chores are assigned and they just need to be done by a certain time of day. That is another approach. I liked all together because it allowed everything to be done at the same time. It was also easier than trying to track down everybody at 3 o’clock and asked if this was done or that was done. Of course, this can be overcome by creating a chore chart in which the child marks off or moves something after he does it. (Assuming the checking is in place—don’t expect what you won’t inspect!)

Whatever approach you decide to take for your chore schedule, be sure that the chores are done regularly. Check out my blog post about three times a day – laundry, dishes, trash. For us personally, we like to give the daily work to younger children. Daily jobs give the child the opportunity to practice that chore over and over again each day. In this way, the child gets better and better at the jobs. They are also very visible as in you can see if the dishes are done or the trash is taken out. Also, they are needed every day, and generally speaking, younger children are around every day whereas older children might go out to a job or sports or extra classes.

If you have not had a true routine set up previously, the first place to start is definitely the dailies. There is no reason to have the coffee tables all dusted when you can’t walk through the living room. Likewise, it is very difficult to dust the room with clutter everywhere. In that way, I would begin training children on daily chores first and foremost. If each child just learned one daily task every couple of weeks, the daily tasks could be passed out, taught, and completed every day within a month’s time. This would make the school day run much more smoothly and give the children a sense of accomplishment and pride to have completed such important jobs.

→For a complete list of all ages and appropriate chores (including Working With Someone Else lists), see our Age-Appropriate Chores Poster Pack.

The post How to Build Chores Into Your Daily Schedule appeared first on Character Ink.