Daily Responsibility Charts - Make Mornings Easier

Are your mornings filled with constant repetition of your children's daily duties?  Do you get tired of saying the same thing at least 20 times?  Well I have a perfect solution for you - a Daily Responsibility Chart.  Make mornings fun and less stressed for you and your children as they get ready to start their day!

In September, I found these great red and green school charts in the $ section at Target, but you can just as easily use poster board or construction paper.  Then you can make up as many responsibilities for each child as you would like.  If your little one doesn't read yet, you can also use clip art/pictures to help them know what their daily responsibilities are.


Responsibilities can include:

• get dressed
• make your bed
• put clothes in hamper
• eat breakfast
• brush teeth
• wash up
• put on sneakers
• get coats on

Then each time they complete a task, they can put a happy face on that task.  If they need to be reminded more than three times, they get a mad face.  If they get through the day with all happy faces, they get a token (or you could do a quarter or something else).  For my children, after they get 7 tokens, they can trade it in for a dollar to put toward a special toy or book.

    

The above and below pictures show the entire chart, and you can see that I printed out my child's morning responsibilities, as well as pictures showing what they need to do for each day of the week (we only follow the chart
Monday through Friday, so school mornings are easier in our house).

Close-up of the responsibility chart.

For the happy faces and mad faces, I took a happy face picture of my children and a mad face picture of my children and used those for the responsibility chart (see pics below).  If your little one doesn't read yet, you can also use pictures to help them know what their daily responsibilities are.

Happy faces and Mad faces - I simply took my sons' pictures twice and then just printed
out a bunch of copies and then cut out the faces to use for the chart.

Then you would add the faces to the chart as the morning goes along, and if
your child doesn't complete one of their tasks, they get a mad face.

If you do not have a chart that you can slip the pictures into (as shown above), you can always put velcro on the chart and on the picture and do it that way.

I cannot begin to tell you how much this helped our mornings - less stress, less yelling and all-around a happier bunch of people in the morning!  YAY!