Kid’s Chores ~ Create a cleaning bucket
Please welcome today Sandy from the very cute blog, Organizing with Sandy. Love the pretty buckets Sandy :)
Having kids helping you can be a chore in itself. Making it fun can help to make it easier to have them help you. Using colors can help to encourage them. It can also help to encourage us!
I make each child a cleaning bucket. It puts them in charge of something and will make them feel more responsible. You can make it very simple. Find a fun colored bucket or basket with handles of some kind.
Everyone is going to feel better about picking up a bright colored bucket instead of dirty grungy gray or black one. You can find them for very little at a dollar store and I have seen them at Target in the Dollar section.
For younger children or children who may not be as responsible to handle a spray of some sort…these wipes are wonderful. They can clean the bathroom, kitchen and even dust their rooms with them.(I wouldn’t use them on real good wood though) You can also spray a rag yourself with a dust spray prior if you don’t want to purchase these. They may be a little extra expense, but it is not like you are using them full time for your cleaning.
The older kids can have a bigger carrier with more cleaning supplies. Having the cleaning supplies ready and accessible can make it much easier and actually encourage them to clean.
For us: I suggest that you keep several cleaning items in each room you use them. If you keep your windex, toilet bowl cleaner and comet downstairs in the laundry room..and your upstairs bathroom needs a quick clean up…then it more than likely won’t happen as often as if the cleaning supplies were accessible.
I suggest keeping in each bathroom:
*mirror cleaner
*toilet bowl cleaner
*sink and shower cleaner
*rag or sponge
*paper towels
Make yourself a fun bucket! We can have fun cleaning too can’t we?
Related posts:
Product Highlight ~ Chore Charts
In keeping with yesterday’s topic on kids and chores, I was doing some surfing around the internet and found these great options for chore charts. They look fun and easy to use.
Responsibility Chart Wall Hanging ~ One Step Ahead Baby $29.95
Melissa & Doug Deluxe Magnetic Responsibility Chart
$16.86
More Time Moms Chore Charts $14.99
I Did My Chores! $12.85
Chore Board~ Etsy $45.00
Customized Homemade Paper Chore Chart Pads
~ Etsy $10.50
Personalized Kid’s Chore Charts ~ Etsy $24.98
Don’t see your favorite? Please feel free to share it with us and leave a link in the comments.
Free Printable Responsibility Chore Charts
I see it happening every day, all around me. Harried and overworked moms trying to juggle way to many balls in the air at the same time. Running here there and everywhere all while trying to maintain a clean and organized home.
How do I recognize it?
That’s easy, it use to be me. I’ve been there and I hope to never to go back.
There are two distinct changes that we made as a family to slow down, carving room in our lives to just be, while reducing stress and saving our sanity.
1. We stopped spending so much time on scheduled activities
2. Everyone contributes in some way to the household responsibilities
Today I’d like to talk about #2….household chores responsibilities and why it’s important to get your kids involved.
First let me just say this. I’m not an expert. I’m a mom who never recognized the power of teaching my children to be contributing members of the household and have since seen the error of my ways and done something about it. And you can to. It’s about everyone in the family pitching in and helping out.
I just can’t stress enough how important it is for children to have regular household duties.
To contribute to the running of the household, everyone doing their part, means not one person is shouldering all the responsibility alone.
It means everyone in the family works as a team.
Many of my friends think I expect a lot from my kids. I don’t see it that way at all. Yes they have responsibilities and yes I believe them to be age appropriate. Does it mean I never have to nag them to do these tasks? No of course not. Does it mean I never have to go behind them to provide gentle correction? No of course not. But it’s not about perfection either. It’s about teaching kids’ responsibility.
The key for us is consistency, correction and consequences.
Here are the responsibilities of my big kids.
Daughter (age 12)
Daily: Pack lunch for school, assist with supper as needed, clean up kitchen after supper, piano practice and homework
Weekly: Clean toilets/sinks, dust main floor, major bedroom tidy, put clean laundry away, change her bedding
Son (age 9)
Daily: Pack lunch for school, unload dishwasher, sweep floor after dinner, homework
Weekly: Clean glass/doorknobs, empty household garbage cans, tidy playroom, major bedroom tidy, put clean laundry away, change his bedding
I have used many different chore chart systems over the years but currently I am using clip boards hung in the kitchen, with a weekly responsibility sheet attached (see below), allowing them to check off tasks as they are completed. This has been working extremely well for us. Now when they come to me to ask if they can do something (insert fun: TV, computer, friends, Wii, etc) I just have to ask them to bring me their chart so I can ensure everything has been completed. The responsibility is theirs and I have to tell you my stress is less.
If you are interested in downloading the charts I use with my kids I’ve included the links below.
For younger kids, charts with pictures might be more appropriate and effective.
Age Appropriate Chores:
If you are looking for a list of appropriate chores, this is one of the most thorough age specific responsibility lists I have seen.
Online Chore Tools:
My Job Chart ~ online chore chart, teaching kids to work
Childzilla ~ online chore assignment, tracking and reward system
Handipoints ~ a fun way to earn cool rewards for completing your chores
PAYjr ~ chore & allowance system
What others are saying about kids and chores:
Get your chore on ~ The Creative Mama
Should Kids Help in the House? Yes!! ~ Organize With Sandy
Household Chores Teach Kids Responsibility ~ Work It, Mom!
It’s not too late, get your kids involved today!
Related posts:
We are not our childrens’ slaves
Product Highlight ~ Chore Charts
What’s your mantra?
Have you ever noticed how the more you have to do, the less you do?
I’ve been so busy lately with year end school activities that my house looks like a bomb went off. Really.
The more overwhelmed I get the more Scrabble on Facebook I just want to sit and play. Seriously, it’s like if I totally focus on something else the mess will just go away. But unfortunately you and I both know it just doesn’t work that way.
I know I have too much on my plate right now because yesterday I did something that I still can’t believe I did. My daughter’s class was going on a field trip and I was asked to meet up with them at the lake with all the picnic lunch supplies (hot dogs, chips, marshmellows, cookies, watermelon, plates, cups, etc..). Sounds easy right? I got everything packed up and organized into boxes, got it all loaded up into the van and away we went. I drove the half hour out and got there just as the very hungry kids in the school bus were pulling in. It was at that precise moment that I realized I’d forgotten one very important thing for a weinie roast. Umm, yah that would be the weiners which by the way are still sitting in the fridge in my basement. I was mortified! Thankfully we were able to get a hold of someone that hadn’t left town yet and they were able to go purchase us some more hot dogs and drive them out, whew. Lunch was a little late but luckily it all worked out in the end.
Yep today is about slowing down. It’s about turning off the computer and getting it together.
Here are a few things I’ll be working on today:
Laundry……
Outgrown clothes……
Outgrown toys…….
A linen closet that needs to be re-organized now that my baby(!) is no longer in his crib…..
Overflowing garbage baskets…..
Dishes….
Rhubarb from the in-laws waiting to be cut up…..
I realize now more than ever that sticking to my daily routines is a must. The feeling of being so overwhelmed that you don’t even know where to begin can bury us. Luckily those negative feelings are just that. I need to replace the negative mantra that blinks so brightly in my mind with something a little more positive and attainable.
Two of my favorite mantras that I constantly use and find very helpful are:
Slow and steady wins the race
and
Eat the frog*
I know it sounds silly but I literally say these over and over and over again when I need to focus. Why? Because if I don’t negative nelly sneaks in to tell me how useless it is and to remind me how tired I am. Gosh that voice is powerful. Block it with reaffirming words and just keep plugging along.
I can do it.
We can do it!
Slow and steady wins the race….
Do you have a mantra that you find yourself repeating in order to get things done?
*Eat The Frog refers to biting the bullet and doing the least desirable chore first to get it out of the way. It’s amazing how getting that one thing done lifts a huge weight off your shoulders and makes everything else to follow that much easier.
We are not our children’s slaves….
I just did a phone interview with my friend Marcia, the Organising Queen, from South Africa. Acck, could a person say ummm anymore than I did. Good grief! The phone delay totally threw me off but I figure it just adds to my freakness which is, as you know, my excuse for everything…LOL. Anyway you can have a listen to it here if you want.
One of the things we talked about though was how important it is to get your kids involved in the organizing process as well as doing age appropriate chores. It’s something I believe strongly in and so in addition to what I had to say about it in my interview I thought I’d elaborate a little more here.
As a stay at home mom it would be so easy for me just to do everything for my kids and not take the time to show them how to do things for themselves. In the grand scheme of things that wouldn’t help them much though would it. Organization is a life skill that we should be teaching our kids. Believe me I would love to march right on in to my kids rooms when they aren’t home and just have my way with their rooms. Instead I choose to work along side of them to help them learn to make the tough choices themselves about what stays and what goes.
Using containers is a wonderful way to teach kids limits and boundaries. For instance my daughter adores notebooks so we mutually agreed on a container that would hold a reasonable amount of notebooks. She now knows that when that container is full she has to decide which ones to keep and which ones to go. That is a hard decision for her to make because of course she loves them all and of course they all hold special meaning to her in some way. As tough as it is though and as hard as it is for me to watch her struggle with the decision I have to remember that she is learning skills that will be invaluable to her in the future when she has a whole household full of stuff to contend with. I regularly walk through the PROCESS with my kids and guide them to an organized space that fits in with their personality. I try hard not to set my kids up for failure. Creating storage for items where they use them and can easily access them can make the difference between success and failure. Just as there is with adults so many different systems and ways to organize any one thing so is there with kids.
Does that mean their rooms are always immaculate and never messy? Ha! Does it mean I don’t have to constantly remind them about what needs to be done and get after their behinds to do it? Ha! In fact if you saw their rooms right now you would wonder if I really was teaching them anything at all. I often wonder that myself believe me. However every once and awhile they will do something that gives me hope that they really just might be catching on to what I’m laying down. It would be unreasonable for me to expect their spaces to be tidy 100% of the time but because we’ve created designated spaces in their rooms for their stuff it’s a relatively quick and painless process to get their rooms back in order on the weekends. I posted awhile ago about some of the other chores my children have here.
I know it’s frustrating and I know that it’s so easy to want to throw our hands up sometimes and say it’s useless but if we are consistent about what is required of our children and consistent with the consequences if it’s not done, results will come….eventually. Also, as Marcia and I talked about in the interview, it’s important to set the example for our kids. If our spaces aren’t organized how can we expect our kids to be any different, we really can’t expect the kids to keep their clothes off the floor if we can’t.
It’s our responsibility as parents to teach our kids responsibility and what better way than with chores and organization. So put together some chore charts and let em have it….they’ll thank you for it……eventually :)
Related posts:
Free Responsibility Chore Charts
Organizing all that school clutter, get the kids involved
Why do we think kids exist to be entertained?
all images courtesy of shutterstock
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