71 Toes: Saturday jobs that work

A while back we revamped our Saturday jobs.

And I've been meaning to share the new system ever since because it works!

I've always been a big believer of what I call the "three P's" of cleaning:

1) PRINT out those jobs so that kids can see what needs to be done...it helps to know there's an end in sight and to see the whole picture of what's expected.

2) Have PATIENCE. It takes a long, long time to teach kids to do jobs the right way, and to stay calm through all the complaining. It helps to remember these kids are young, and it's ok if it takes months to learn how do things like clean a bathroom.

3) Be PERSISTENT. Don't give up. Once a system is in place stick to it so those kids know that's just "what we do," and we may as well just get it done.

I'm here to say that after eighteen years of mothering the job thing needs to be tweaked and tweaked over and over again. But I love having a system in place that I can work from.

For years we had long lists of Saturday jobs I would write down according to what needed to be done. I'd draw my little circles for the kids to fill them in as they go (something passed on by my dad when I was young).

Then we figured out how miraculous it would be to print those things out each week, which we did for years.

Just this year I decided the kids needed more detailed instructions so I wrote down every detail I could think of, things like cleaning out the trash can after you take out the trash or washing inside the microwave, not just the outside, etc. (since my kids are "old" now they can handle more details).

I printed out five lists, put page protectors on them, and assigned each child one list each month. At the beginning of the next month I erased those names and rotated the jobs.

I know that seems simple, but it was revolutionary for me because it stopped all the nagging, stopped the weekly need to print them out, stopped most of the complaining, and things get done.

I just pull those little puppies out of out and stick them on the counter on Friday night (or the kids pull them out if I forget) and they get to work knowing exactly what they need to do before they hang with friends or watch a movie or lallygag (why is "lallygag" such an awesome word??).

They mark off everything they need to do, check in with me so I can inspect their work, and then we wipe off their marks and they are ready for next week.

***note: These lists don't include their bedroom and bathroom jobs they do automatically now. Sometimes I think I should write all those down too, but I don't want the list to seem so daunting and they have been doing those things for so many years I think their bodies go into auto-clean mode on those things by now.

Claire and Lu were the only ones around when I pulled my camera out the other day, so here they are all smiles that they finished (although I already erased claire's check-offs that day).

At first Lucy's jobs stayed the same, and her list was a little shorter because I'm trying to make sure she's trained properly.

She's getting pretty darn good at her original list so I am starting to train her on another list.

I still need to tweak these lists...some still need more details, but man it's making our Saturdays pretty awesome.

Teaching kids to work is a tough job. But once they start to get things down it feels a little bit like magic to me. Sure, as soon as I feel like I've got things down to a science everything falls apart and we have to re-vamp (take our daily job charts for instance that have remained blank for five weeks...).

But right now this system is a little dreamy to me so I figured I'd share.

Happy cleaning!