Chores

My husband and I have had the goal for a long time to start some kind of chores system with our boys. Our oldest is almost 6, so it's about time! We finally decided on a system, and so far it's working great! We made the above chore chart out of pegboard from the hardware store (we made it big enough so that we can add on Baby J eventually . . . and possibly one more). My husband cut some dowels into small pieces, and we used those to hang pictures of their required chores. We decided to go with pictures so that our 2 year-old could easily see what he was supposed to do. It's not the cutest chore chart I've seen (by far!) but it serves its purpose and should be durable. The boys each have a morning job, an afternoon job, and a dinner job. Then on Saturdays, they each have 3 or 4 jobs to do. I struggled with whether or not to pay them, but in the end we decided we would. It's a good opportunity for them to learn about money, and I'm hoping that it might eliminate some of the begging at the stores - I'll be able to tell them they can use their own money if they want something! Also, they're much more motivated this way! :) They get paid 10 cents per job. We pay them each night for the jobs they do (except Sunday), and then on Saturdays we exchange their dimes for dollars/quarters/etc., just so we don't have to constantly be getting more dimes. I got the idea to do the money this way here, her reasoning made a lot of sense to me. The boys are very motivated and my house is already much cleaner, yay!

Another idea for chores, especially with smaller children, is the "Chore Bucket." We used this idea a couple of years ago with my oldest son (though I didn't do a very good job of keeping it up). I just mod podged some cute paper onto an old formula can, then wrote different chores he could do on small pieces of paper. Then, I would just have him choose one or two per day.