Friday, June 14, 2013

Responsibilities Flip Chart

I love Pinterest. During nap time or when I can't sleep at night, I like to look at all the awesome craft, parenting, travel, etc ideas...there is so much out there! I've actually done quite a few of my pins and most of the time even take pictures so I can blog about them. I just haven't been doing a lot of blogging lately...
One of the things I finally got around to doing was the Chore Chart. I've pretty much been obsessed with the idea ever since I saw the Pin months ago...You can find the tutorial here.

I actually modified it a bit and used colored file folders as the base. I thought that would make it easier but in the end it took me quite a bit longer than I had imagined.


You can also see the printing on the inside of the folders. I thought about trying to cover it up somehow but in the end, just wanted to get it done.

Since he is only 3 years old I figured five responsibilities per chart was enough. There are some others I could have added like "Potty" for night time, but I decided it was better to have just a few and hope we could make/keep things like going potty part of the bath time ritual. 

I chose a yellow folder for the morning (good morning, sunshine!) and a blue for the evening. Using free clip art from the internet made it pretty simple and I then added some color with color pencils (our printer is perpetually low on ink). So, when it's open you have the pictures as well as the words for each responsibility. Once that responsibility is accomplished, you "flip the flap" and see that it is "Done!" Last night, we opened all the flaps for the morning so they'd be ready to go. This morning we opened all the flaps for the evening so when we go up for bed, it's ready to go.
It was fun to see the finished product - I really like to do things that end up nice and are going to be useful. Bubba helped me figure out where we going to hang them and we used them last night and this morning. He seems pretty excited about them in general and looks forward to "flipping the flaps" as he accomplishes each responsibility.





Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Tooth Brushing Chart

Quite a while ago, I saw a really cool tooth brushing chart on Pinterest. When I went to the blog post on Dukes and Duchesses (you can see it here), I noticed in one of the comments that the author said she might be willing to make and sell the charts if people were interested. As soon as I saw that, I knew I had to have one.

We've been working on getting Bubba to get in the habit of brushing his teeth every morning and night. Sometimes, life gets in the way and it's easy to forget the teeth. I thought with a chart like this on the mirror, it would help keep us all on track.

I got the chart in the mail yesterday. I've never worked with transfer paper so luckily one of the e-mails included directions. It still didn't come off as well as easily as I would have liked but I finally got it. Then, I was so excited to get it on the mirror that I probably could have been a little more exacting. You can see in the not so great picture that it's a bit crooked. But "perfect is the enemy of good," right?

I think Bubba will really like it. He seems to be like me in that he likes to mark things off or in other ways show he has accomplished something. I've still got to put the marker on the mirror for him to use but other than that, we're ready to start keeping track/marking off tooth brushing.