Reward systems are great for teaching kids good habits and responsibility. We were struggling at keeping our kids in bed in December and a hand-made behavior chart did the trick. It’s amazing to see how kids respond with a goal laid out ahead of them! I was just introduced to another kind of Chore Chart online for kids called GoalForIt.com.
The concept is to give kids choices to do their chores and make good behavior and healthy decisions in exchange for rewards. Like I said, we’ve tried home-made charts that are only so exciting. GoalForIt.com is lightyears ahead of my paper charts!
You get to create a custom chart for your child with a theme of your choice, there are plenty of lively fun themes like Aliens and Sport for boys and Animated story characters and Hearts for girls. Next, you choose the chores that you want your kids to work on get rewarded for. There are more than 50 common chores to choose from that are age appropriate based on the age you input for your child. Each chore is colorful with animations. Next, you assign a point value for each chore. For instance, I want my son to work harder on his sight words than on putting on his pajamas, so I awarded 2 points for sight words and just 1 point for pjs.
Each day your child completes a task, they get to put a sticker on their chart. We started this last week. As you can see, some are blank, to no fault of Elijah’s as we were out of town. He didn’t have the opportunity to put away his toys and we skipped sight words. However, you can see the bottom of the chart there is a “moolah” section. This is the tally of each day’s points earned and the total for the week. Elijah earned 38 points this week.
For this, he can either save the moolah or he can cash it in for rewards that we set together earlier. Pick the movie for movie night, 1 hour of playtime where he chooses what we play, $1 toy. He chose the Movie and 1 hour of playtime. You can even print out a certificate with your child’s moolah choice to redeem! We watched Mr. Popper’s Penguins, which was quite funny and we played Swamp animals with his stuffed animals as a family. The chore chart was a hit with Elijah.
Elizabeth is 5, so she too is old enough to do many things on her own and around the house. She is my little helper. She really, really loves her chore chart.
There are some chores or behaviors that we are trying to improve for both kids, so each chart has those. There are other things that are specific for each child, so we added those to each child’s chart. For Elizabeth, we added “No Whining”. If you notice, that result for that task was “Keep Trying, you can do it” while the others were very successful. For me, this was a good way to evaluate how much she is actually whining and what days. Is she more tired on those days? Bored? It’s a great tool for parents as well. If you notice, for “go to bed on time” there are 2 circles crossed out, that means that on those days, they don’t need to earn points doing that chore or behavior. For us, weekends are flexible so we skipped going to bed on time.
For us, this system is like magic. My kids are eager to do their chores and put the sticker on the chart. My daughter is not only picking up her toys but her brother’s for points. This week, we added more tasks for them to earn points for because they wanted to! We added “Help mom” because my kids were asking to vacuum, set the table, and help with dishes so they could earn more points.
I like the chore chart way better than offering an allowance to my young kids. We tried that too but it felt like I was just bribing them with $1 to help put their folded laundry away, etc. The chore chart reinforces good habits, good behavior, and responsibility with chores. Their rewards are things that are important to them.
The GoalForIt.com chore charts were a hit at my home. They offer a variety of themes for boys, girls, tweens, and teens. It is a positive way to engage your children and they will love it! And the chore charts are FREE!
This was a paid post. My own opinions were used based on my perceptions and experience.
