Back To School Traditions...

Whether you home-school or not, every family tends to have some back to school traditions. We have several that we do. Some are more consistent than others. Here are a couple:

One that has stayed on for the past several years is buying new shirts for the first day of school combined with the tradition of taking First Day pictures throughout the day. Some years we have matched, some years we haven't. Here are last year's First Day Pics and Shirts:

 Bob

 Fred

 Mac

 George

 Lil Mr

As you can see, each kiddo has their own unique style of what they choose for their First Day of School! The kiddos have been asking the past couple days when we are going to get their new shirts and I can tell that will have to be taken care of this week! After all, there is LESS than a week till school starts!!!

So what are your family's First Day of School Traditions?

Ready For School!

After a couple weeks of lesson planning, we are pretty much ready to go! I have one more subject to order once payday hits and some things to print off, other than that we are set.

This year I will be full time schooling my four daughters, and I will be starting preschool with my son. He will be going to a therapy school two days a week and then two days a week we will be working on preschool stuff at home. He is so excited, he can hardly stand it!

Summer Update

We are currently enjoying several weeks of summer before school starts again! 

As you can see by the above picture, we have been enjoying our summer break! We have had a couple small vacations as well as day trips with friends.

If you remember from my last post from July, we started year round schooling. So we are currently in our last break, our summer break, before the new school year starts in September. We plan on doing year round schooling again this school year. The kids really enjoyed it and begged for us to continue doing it!

I will be posting more regularily once school starts up again, till then, you will be seeing a post on homeschool curriculum in the near future and I will tell you what we are planning this year. Which is a lot more eclectic than past years!

New Chore System- Zone Responsibillity

Hi there! I hope that everyone's summer is going great! We have been doing good here, just enjoying our time with family and friends as well as some small vacations and day trips. 

I wanted to talk about one thing that we started at the beginning of summer regarding our chores around the house. I am one to always look for a better/more effective or efficient way to do things. We have done a chore chart for the past ten years since my oldest was about two years old. However, in the past six months, I was thinking that it was about time for a change. Here are the reasons:

1. With having five kids, I was having a hard time training one on one how to properly do things. For instance: My older two girls were in charge of the dishwasher, taking turns every other day to load and unload. The problem would be when I went to work in the kitchen and found either dirty dishes in the cupboard or maybe things not put away properly, I would not know who I needed to re-train. 
2. I was constantly going to the chore chart to see who's day it was to do the garbage/clean bathroom etc. It was not an effective system for us.

After doing some thinking and reading about how other large families keep a handle on things, I decided we would start doing zones. So here is what we are doing:

• We split the house into five zones: Kitchen, kids' bathroom, living room, dining room and laundry room.
• We made a list of what needs to be done in each room and posted them on the wall. Such as for living room: Vacuum/empty garbage/dust/tidy etc...
• We assigned one child to each zone, yes, including the three year old!
• They switch rooms at the beginning of the month.

How is this working for us? We are loving it! The kids love that they have just one room to concentrate on. They are also enjoying the one on one training time with mom! How am I liking it? Well, now when I am working in a room and I see something that needs to be done, I can just ask whoever is in charge of that room to come take care of it. When there is training that needs to be done, I don't have to look and see who is in charge of that particular chore for the day, I ask whoever is in charge to come and we train. 

At the beginning of the month, when we change zones, I spend a couple days training the younger kids on what they need to know for the new room. After they have spent a couple days learning, I merely go verbally through the list of chores every day to make sure they have completed their tasks. Then just train as needed throughout the month.

As far as my three year old, he just becomes my buddy for whatever room he is "in charge of"! For instance, right now, he is in charge of the kitchen! So he is helping me put dishes away, load the dishwasher, clean, cook etc...last month he helped me in the dining room and the month before it was the living room.

Tonight I asked the girls if they would rather do zones or a chore list and they said in unison: "ZONES!"