Organising my Daughter Part 1

Its almost Little Miss 7's birthday. She is about to become Little Miss 8. And that means that its time for her job list to be updated. Every year i add a few more things to the list of things that she is responsible for . I am hoping to teach her that she is responsible for some of her environment and i am also hoping that some of my organisational skills will rub off on her.

I wont lie, i am also helping that by helping her to become more responsible and more organised, there might be a chance that my house might get a bit calmer. You see at the moment school mornings in my house can be best described using the word "chaos".

A calm stress free household is what i am hoping to achieve by helping my daughter to become organised.

What steps have i taken to try and achieve this?

I have made up some mini signs to label her clothes drawers. I printed them, then cut them out and stuck them on the corresponding drawers. They are only simple but they will do the job. I am hoping this will do two things   

1)help her to choose her own clothes so she can get dressed without me having to ask her 100 times.

    2)enable her to put her own washing away. 

Drawer signs

The next thing that i have done is design her a morning routine. I have laid out her morning step by step so she knows exactly what she should be doing with out needing to ask me. In an attempt to speed her up a little i included time frames next to each job and I brought a digital clock and placed it in her room so she can keep track of her efforts.

 I made her a list of things that she needs to have packed each day 

And i made her an afternoon and evening routine as well

Having these lists up in a place where Miss 7 can see them Has been working really well for me. She loves to read out her jobs and yell out "Check" after each job that she has completed. Its not a miracle cure, and she still complains about not wanting to do one job or another every now and then. But for the most part she now knows what is expected of her, and she knows that getting her chores done means being able to go and play.  These systems have created a sense of calm in a place that used to be ruled by chaos. 

Now i need to get to work on solving the "clean your room" and "do your homework" fights that happen most afternoons.... I will blog these as soon as i figure something out. So stay tuned for part 2