One question I get asked often is 'how does your family handle chores?' So I thought today I would answer that question.Over the years we have adapted our own method for organizing and getting chores done. Way back when I had a lot of time on my hands I use to print up my own pictures and words on the computer and create stickers then put them on magnets and our chore system was placed on the kitchen refrigerator....
Then I learned about this wonderful company called Family Tools. I took what I had already developed as a system with our family and I adapted it using their P.E.G.S system. Basically this allowed me to free up our refrigerator and it is a great visual reminder for me to check and see what has or hasn't been completed each day. I really do like their pictures.
Now I must stop and say we absolutely do not believe their should be a reward system attached to doing chores around the house. We do not offer allowances or special treats for getting chores done. Our belief has always been that chores are the basic training grounds for learning about charity towards each other and our home and responsibility. Chores are a team effort.
With that being said this is how we have set up our family chore system. The peg board is kept in the kitchen because I need a location with high visibility mostly for reminders, otherwise they would be forgotten. I used my label machine to put every one's names along the left side of the board, and every tag in that row is their personal chores for that day.
If you notice across the top you will see some yellow tags labeled daily chores, weekly chores, meal jobs and two clock tags. The two clock tags separate my day into a morning time zone for chores and an afternoon time zone for chores. I don't put an exact time because our homeschool schedule fluctuates too much. The meal job chores are for dinner time and these are mostly for the four older children.
Then if you notice along the bottom I have rings with different colored tags and chore tags. Each color represents a day of the week. This visual along with the picture tags has been incredibly helpful with my non-readers, all the way down to my four year olds. For us Mondays are purple, Tuesdays are yellow, Wednesdays are blue, Thursdays are red and Fridays are green. So this particular board is set up with Thursday's chores.
A couple years ago when my homeschool doubled and the workload got more intense for the older ones we went from doing all our chores on Monday mornings to spreading them out over the week. The best way I found to organize that task was to purchase some extra sheets of chore pictures/words from Family Tools and place whatever chores I needed done on that certain day. What I did was to take our home and divide it into three zones. The upstairs, main level and basement. Because the main level is the most used area of the house we have dedicated chores to this zone three days per week, then one day goes for upstairs and one goes for downstairs. Well, I hope you found this helpful and it answers the commonly asked question 'how does your family handle household chores'.
