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Josh and I have been trying to come up with a better plan for tracking Jonathan's chores and encouraging him to obey, have a good attitude, etc. I read this post last week about how one mom created a chore chart and thought that this might work well for Jonathan.
I bought the chore chart through Amazon and set to work creating the chore cards. I started by making a list of things that we wanted Jonathan to start doing on his own around the house, keep doing with fewer reminders from us, and behavior points we wanted him to remember. I used some of the cards as well as the reward tickets from the printable in the post on the Confessions of a Homeschooler Blog; I just changed the font and/or the wording on some. The additional images are from Graphics Factory. I laid the cards out in Pages, printed them on card stock, then laminated them. I labeled the main areas of the chart to help him find the cards more easily.
Let's start from the top and work our way down (you can click on the picture above to make it larger)…
- Title – That's pretty obvious 🙂
- Reward Tickets – See below for how to earn tickets. The small insert is laminated so we can write on it with a dry-erase marker to update the tallies each day.
- Reward – Jonathan is currently working towards earning Edward for his Thomas the Train set. This is what he wanted. He actually has a list of trains that he wants… We decided to make Edward worth 300 tickets. That was tough to determine. We wanted the first goal to not take too long so that he'd get frustrated, but not so short that he thinks he's going to get a big reward like that every day or every week. This reward will take him close to a month to earn if he is near perfect.
- Behavior – We decided that having a good attitude, obeying mommy and daddy, using manners, and no complaining were important things that we wanted to work on. If he has to be reminded too many times of one of these things, he'll be moved from the green card to the yellow card. If he continues to ignore one of the things, he'd be moved to a red card. After that, we start taking tickets away.
- Chores – These are broken down into Morning, Evening, Day, and Extra. Each morning after breakfast, he is to brush his teeth, pick out and put on his own clothes, and put his PJ's in the hamper. Over the course of the day, he needs to complete his schoolwork, read out loud to one of us for 15 minutes, take a nap/rest in his room for at least an hour after lunch, remember to flush and wash each time he uses the potty, clean up his toys when he is done with something and at the end of the day, help set the table for meals, clear his own dishes after each meal, and put his laundry away. At night, he is to brush his teeth, put his PJ's on, and put his dirty clothes in the hamper.
- Extras – These are things that he can do to earn extra tickets. I plan to hand write tickets and put them here as needed too.
- $ – These are tasks that earn money. Right now, Jonathan is responsible for putting the silverware away and has been for a while. This earns $.10 each time. He puts one penny in his God jar, one in his Lightning McQueen bank, and the rest in his spending jar. This teaching him to tithe and save first, then what is left over can be spent as he has enough to buy what he wants. We've been doing this for a while. We decided to put it on the chart to help us remember to pay him and remind him that it needs to be done.
- Completed – When Jonathan completes a chore and it has been inspected, he moves the card to the completed area. At the end of the day, we count together the number of chores completed to see how many tickets he earned. We add that to the tickets he already has and update the tallies.
We've been using this for a few days now and it is working so well! All we have to say is “check the chart” or “you're on a yellow card for obedience” or “if you want to earn a ticket for ____ you must complete the task”, etc. Jonathan is so excited about earning that Edward!
What do you do to track chores and encourage good behavior?
