Weekly Jobs

The home is the great laboratory of love.  There the raw chemicals of selfishness and greed are melded in the crucible of cooperation to yield compassionate concern and love one for another." - Russell M. Nelson

"Weekly" jobs is kind of a misnomer because we actually do them every day, but they are the things that I would like to get cleaned once a week.  For example on Mondays we clean the living room and front room, Tuesdays the bathroom, etc.

We have cards (I use Dianne Jepson's HAnnDi work system).  We've adapted it to fit our needs, but it is really a wonderful system if you're struggling with coming up with one for yourself.  I like that it gives the kids choice in what they do.  We've been using it for almost a year with great success.  That is unheard of for a chore system around here (we used to go through systems until we got bored and then tried a new one).

If you have time to make one yourself, you would just have to go through each room, write down each thing that needs to be done on a separate card (she color codes by room), separate each thing into how often you want to have it done (daily, weekly, monthly or seasonally) and give each thing a point value (depending on the difficulty).

Basically, you pick out the cards that you want done that day, put them on the table, then each child has to pick a certain number of points (depending on their age) each day.

I like to pick cards that are in the same room so that even though we're working on different tasks (unlike meal time clean-up and family-project time), we're still mostly in the same room working on the same goal (cleaning that room).

Here's an example:
On Tuesday, I would put out the weekly bathroom cards: Toilet (1 point), Surface Wipe Down (1 point), Floors (1 point), Mirror (1/2 point), Sink (1/2 point), Bathtubs/Showers (1 point).  Spice has to picks 3 points, Bud picks 2 and Little Miss picks 1.   I should probably have Bazinks start picking, but for now he just helps out here and there.
I don't pick any - my job is to help them with what they need help with and to supervise (I do work the whole time because the little ones need a lot of help!)

Some kids race ahead and finish all their jobs in all 4 bathrooms quickly so they can play before breakfast.  It's fine with me as long as they do them well, otherwise I call them back and point out what they missed.

In the HAnnDi work system, the monthly and seasonal jobs are rotated into the jobs that are picked each morning, but I just decided to start using them for our family project time (more on this later) since I don't seem to ever get to them otherwise.

The kids seem to thrive on this system since they get to pick the jobs they will do.  I guess it gives them a sense of ownership.  They often pick the same jobs each time, but they still like the fact that they get the choice.

This post is part of my thoughts on how to the kids to work.