The Weekly Roster shows the seven days of the week and is divided in to four time slots - before school, at school, after school and after tea.   They are A4 (210mm x 297mm) in size and laminated. They have your child’s name at the top and are printed in the colour of their choice.  (It helps if this colour is the same as their Base Sheets for their Chore Charts.)  

The activity tags are removable allowing them to be changed whenever the school time-table or after school activities change.

Each Weekly Roster comes supplied with one complete set of individual activities.

Learning with Weekly Rosters

If teaching your kids personal qualities such as ownership and responsibility are important to you, then Weekly Rosters are a great place to start!

The weekly Roster is not just a tool for working out who does what and when, but it is excellent in helping to develop other valuable qualities such as:

Responsibility

By knowing what activities are taking place at school each day, it becomes possible for the children to ensure that school bags are packed with everything that they will need for the day.

If it is on the Weekly Roster then it becomes child’s responsibility to make sure it’s packed and ready to go.  No more “Mum, I couldn’t change my readers today because you didn’t put them in my bag!”

Ownership

Ownership and responsibility go hand in hand.  Ownership is more the acknowledgement within the child that it was their problem and no-one else’s if something was not packed, or ready, for the school day.  In taking ownership it means that the child recognises that the blame lies solely with themselves and no-one else if something isn't ready.

Too many adults these days still don’t possess this quality and are always looking to blame someone else when things don’t go their way, rather than looking within to where the problem really lies!

If you can start the learning process early enough, your kids will grow up to be well balanced responsible adults.

Organisation

It’s amazing how many children get to their senior years at high school and still have no idea how to organise their time.  This is because as parents, we do it all for them.

Kids need to learn the ability to organise and it starts with simple things like saying to themselves “Have I got everything I need for today? I’II just check the roster to make sure.”  Or realising that now they’ve started footy training twice a week they’re going to have to work out when their homework is going to get done.  The moveable tags on the Weekly Roster allow for constant repositioning of activities until a working time system is established.

And for some kids it really is a visual thing.  It’s not enough to list all the things they need to achieve in a week as it will just become a blur to them.  But if it is laid it out in front of them, along with the available space in each day, it becomes a lot clearer to them and they develop a much better understanding of how to manage time and organise activities.

Negotiation

A good example of this is if you only have one computer and everyone wants to use it the children can negotiate between themselves when each of them can use it by checking each other’s weekly roster.   (This was definitely the biggest blessing of the Weekly Roster in our house!)

“Joe, what if I have my time on the computer when you are at footy training on Wednesday and then Sarah can have her time when I’m doing swimming lessons and you’re doing homework on Tuesday.”

Once again, the benefits of using a Weekly Roster for each of your children is limited only by your imagination! So order them now!  The sooner you order the sooner you can stop being a nagging parent butting heads with your kids every step of the way.

HOW DO YOU USE THEM?

The idea behind the Weekly Roster is that it takes the argument out of the small every day things and enables the children to be responsible for themselves.

Once you receive your Weekly Roster, use the activity tags to lay out what school activities are taking place each day, on each child’s Roster.  For example, art, library, sport etc.  Then, every morning, the children can be responsible themselves for what goes into their school bag.  So if they forget their runners for sport, they have no one to blame but themselves.  This is how learning responsibility begins, by taking ownership of your own actions.

In conjunction with the kids, work out what time slots would be appropriate for other activities.   For example, if they need to do music practice, decide between you when this practice will take place. Is there time before school to do it?  How many days a week do they need to practice?   Once you have decided on when and how it should happen, place the tags on the Roster in the appropriate places.  Now this has been done there is no longer any argument or nagging necessary when it comes time to practice as the ground rules have already been established and most importantly, by mutual agreement.

One of the best things I found with the Weekly Rosters is it took all the arguments out of free computer time.  Every day I was encountering their arguments  “..but he had it yesterday!”   “When am I going to get my turn ‘cos I’ve gotta go to footy practice!”  So we worked out a system.   Each of the boys got two hours free computer time during the week.  Each computer tag represented 1 hour of computer time and between the two boys themselves, they worked out, around all their other activities on the roster, when they could each have their computer time and they put the “computer” tag on their Weekly Roster for the time slot they had negotiated. On the days when they both had computer time, they established that one could have it before tea and one after, and while each was on the computer, the other was doing their homework.

And I swear, it stopped the progression of my grey hairs in their tracks! Because they had worked it out between themselves, it took all the argument out of it. If footy practice changed or a new activity was taken up, between them they rescheduled the computer time so that it was still fair.

SO START ORDERING NOW! The sooner you get your Weekly Roster established for each of the kids, the sooner you will be reaping the rewards of a more harmonious household! (Of which I am certain is every parents dream!)