Live.Awake

Job Jar

// September 12th, 2007 // Family Life

Chili from Don’t Try This At Home is hosting a blog carnival about chores. When I first saw this carnival, I thought about how excited I was to read everyone else’s ideas, but knew I had nothing to share. As I thought about it, I remembered something that I am planning on implementing when my children get just a little bit older. There were six of us kids and having that many people in a house can create quite a mess. My mom was always looking for creative ways to get us to clean but make it fun at the same time. My favorite was called “Job Jar”. We all loved it and looking back it was a great trick to get us to do the chores. What she would do is get scrap pieces of paper and write on them things that she knew that we could do. Some good ones were:

• Wash windows-she would make this lots of different jobs. Like, wash windows in living room, wash windows in dining room, etc
• Clean toilets
• Pick up toys
• Dust-again she would make this a lot of different jobs
• Vacuum…you get the picture

There were certain jobs that the younger kids could do and if the older kids picked too many of those mom would get us to put them back so there would be stuff for the younger ones to do. The thing that made it fun though, is she would put fun stuff in there like:

• Airplane Ride-if we drew that she would stop the heavier cleaning she was doing and lay on her back and give us an airplane ride on her legs
• Read a book
• Tickle
• Take a Break
• Go for a walk with mom (we would wait and do this afterwards)
• Run around the house two times (we thought that was great fun)

Occasionally she would promise that if we finished the job jar she would take us to have ice cream at McDonalds. All of the kids really enjoyed it. We would blast music and race to do the chores in the hopes that we could get one of the fun things. Mom was able to clean stuff that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to clean. She says now that she would sometimes have to go behind us and redo some things, but it was worth it for us to learn the value of work and to get the majority of the cleaning done. We have fond memories of doing this and I know most of us are planning on doing the same thing with our kids.