Made for sanity, on my part. The author of Leading Little Hearts Home and I have been having a somewhat ongoing conversation about the idea “you EXpect what you INspect”. She also has a large family and we both find it challenging to inspect to make sure our directions are being followed. She said that she and her husband had been kicking around the idea of Mom having a checklist to go inspect what the children were to be doing. Sometime during the night, I combined her idea with a few of my own, and this is what I came up with:
1. Doing the “zones” in the kid’s rooms is working fabulously. For the household chores, not so fabulously. Why? Well, let’s say Bubba doesn’t finish his school until 4:30. Everyone else has to wait until then to do their chores. That’s a problem. It was also hard for the kiddos not to have specific assigned jobs. I was having to delegate on the spot, which I do not like to do, because for our house, it creates chaos. So, zones for household chores went out the window and I went back to a specific set of jobs for each person to do in a particular room. So, we are all still working together, but with a specific set of things to do.
2. Chores should be done at the beginning of the day, not after school. The kiddos get up around 7:00, and I usually have breakfast ready then, for them and Mr. OverKill. So, we set the time of 9:00am for all chores to be completed. At which time, I will go around with a checklist and INspect the chores that have been done. Unless of course, they finish early, and I can INspect early, after which they can have free time.
3. School will now start at 9:00am. We will start with the subjects that we do together, instead of waiting to do them after the graded subjects.
We sort of implemented this today and it went well. The kids actually liked the idea of having an “INspection”. I suppose that when I don’t follow through and check in on their work, they feel like I do sometimes, “Why did I bother, she doesn’t really care.”