More Family Chores-Play Room (Sarah's Counter)

We've been working on doing a "family chore" for a half hour after lunch and reading a few times per week. Today we tackled the playroom and Sarah's counter. Isn't it beautiful!!?  Thursday I think we'll pick up the sunroom and playroom and vacuum. Hey that rhymes!

More Family Chores-Play Room

I'm in the season of planning and perfecting our routine. Part of our new afternoon routine is a "family chore". Yesterday we tackled Daniel's counter in the play room (which is really our family room converted to a "play" space, though I like to think of it as an "educational laboratory"). Today (Thursday) I put off the family chore, we'll do Sarah's side tomorrow.

The first photo doesn't really show the HEAP of stuff that was on his counter. The top photo is after we'd sorted and cleared a lot of stuff away. The 2nd photo is today...he has a few things on the counter (not to mention the duct tape that says "Dan") and he's USED his counter several times today. He even did his math there this morning. The process continues...

New Routines On Paper

Early on I figured out I wasn't a "by-the-hour" type of scheduler for our homeschool day. I prefer blocks of time (which is what Marilyn suggests in her book Develop A Lifestyle Routine). I post a monthly calendar so we can see what "events" we have each month. And now I have my new time blocks up which really helps us move through our mornings.

Our mornings are very fluid. Sometimes we want to play cards together or read and don't always have breakfast in the same order so it is nice to have a list of what we want to accomplish. Here's what's our our morning time block looks like for now:
-put on one hour of worship music
-kids empty dishwasher
-eat breakfast
-morning chore
-do bookwork (right now that includes: math & copywork)
-mom reads: history (we're currently using H.A. Guerber's Story of Ancient World) and fun reading
-brush teeth & brush hair
-Daniel shower

Season 4-Liberating Your Routine

Reading Marilyn's book.

Life Is Truly A Process - CHORES

Well, I've been convicted that I need to do some more bookwork with the kids so along with that comes looking at my routine. This brings up the need to add some more chores to do together (since they have mastered the one daily chore they are responsible for) so they can learn how to sort (thanks Marilyn!) and clean things.

The kids have a "personal chore" each day except Friday and it gets done before lunch each day. We've been doing that for about 6 months, so we don't have complaining anymore, amazing, they just do it.
Monday-bring down dirty laundry
Tuesday-collect upstair garbage together
Wednesday-strip sheets of beds
Thursday-take up clean folded laundry

Along with this I'm wanting to add a "family chore" for us to do together. Especially, since we have major clutter (A serious MESS!) Life is such a process, yet each moment adds up to a lifetime...so I'm trying to focus on the moments (not the "destination").

I selected a small area for us to sort and clean together today...and we did SO MUCH MORE! WOW, I'm so excited! We needed to vacuum the dining room (Daniel OFFERED to vacuum!) so we did that together and went down the hall and vacuumed the entry, too. Our official family chore was to sort and clean the upstairs hallway (about 4'x12') and stairs. Seems small but it was covered with STUFF (do you know what I mean?) So, I told the kids to sort like-things-with-like...a brilliant way to clean! Marilyn mentioned "teaching your kids to sort while cleaning" on Tuesday night and just this one thought has helped ME focus and helped me model for them. They caught on, though I did the most which was fine. We'll certainly be doing more of this (soon)!

Laaaaa la la la laallalaallaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! We have clean stairs and hallway!