How We’re Setting up a System for our Kids’ Summer Chores

In my last post, I talked about how I’ve been getting the summer lined up using some of the Summer with Kids printables I’ve created to help organize our family in this season!

In this post, I’m going to talk about how, armed with my big picture plan, I can get down to daily details. This is all about getting your kids summer chores set up with a system!

For our school-aged children, this is pretty basic. On a daily basis, everyone needs to do some tidy and personal care. Weekly, we need to get some chores done. I’ve used Clean Mama printables for myself for a while, but summertime means kids can chip in.

So, I’ve made a Summer Chore Chart that you can download to help your kids summer chores set up with a system! You’ll need one printable for each kid, for each week. I recommend getting these printed and ready on Saturday or Sunday, or even keeping a stack of them ready to go for the whole summer.

Here’s how this works at our house (and I think you’ll really like this system)! Kids get dollars for “jobs” and “points” for reading (one minute reading = one point). Dollars (at least at this point) are to be saved. Points can be traded in for special activities, like coupons for treats, special meals, screen time, or even something big. (We have one who is ONLY motivated by Legos and couldn’t care less about screen time. In an effort to motivate him, we’re doing Lego sets for points this summer and he’s pumped!)

At the end of every week, we tally up how much allowance they get (and it’s actually more like compensation—ten cents per task). The total number of minutes read is tallied up on each chore chart. And I save all the completed chore charts in our Summer Binder, just to keep a record. (Psst, you can grab my free Summer Binder Title Page here to make your own binder cute and fun!)

The minimum number of required minutes read per day is 20. Over the course of ten summer weeks, this amounts to 1,400 minutes (or about 24 hours of reading). This is awesome, but I love the motivation the points system adds on top of this requirement. Just today, I’ve talked about goal setting with one child, and he’s motivated to read for an hour per day to get to the 1,400 mark sooner. The 1,400 mark is where big prizes start to kick in. And I’ve promised a HUGE surprise to any kid that can make it to 2,800 reading points before school starts next fall!

In my next post, I’m going to talk about our “Job Jar”, a summer chore system we’ve just implemented for keeping the house straight this summer! Stay tuned!

Are you implementing a summer chore list or reward system for your kiddos? Let me know about your kids summer chores below!