We were mostly a chore chart family until recently.  Many of you are familiar with Steve and Teri Maxwell's newest book, Managers of Their Chores, and if you're not you might want to go take a look.

While our children have always had chores and yours might as well, we had a perennial problem of "forgetting" certain chores, particularly if I was busy doing chores myself.  My follow-up wasn't always the best.  The Maxwells teach a system that utilizes clip-on packs with the child's chores printed neatly on each card and then WORN.  Yes, worn.  This is brilliant!  No more forgetting, no more missing critical chores, no more me failing to check the finished work.

In the above photo, our six-year-old is happily wearing her pack.  And yes, I posed this photo

You can make cards with pictures on them for your non-readers:

Let's talk chores.  I'm going to skip the theory and go straight to the helpful stuff, except to encourage you that if you're at the beginning of your homeschooling journey with little ones, you'll need help so train them to help!  And if you're like many women of our generation, you perhaps entered marriage with not a lot of homemaking skills, so give your children the advantage you never had and teach them to manage a household cheerfully.

There are so many ways to go about this and I think we've tried them all.  In the beginning, I simply taught them to pick up after themselves and some of our children are better at that than others.  That's an understatement!

Anyway, the simplest way to train a little one what chores they have is by using their fingers.  Even a two-year-old can hold up his hand and remember five things; in our home they are tidy room, make bed, brush teeth, get dressed, and pray for their day.  Keep in mind that "make bed" for our littlest means that she stands and watches me tidy the blanket in her crib.

Stacy at ReformingMama made a terrific chore system for her little ones.  Brilliant!