Helping Children Become More Independent Learners

Resources to help the kiddos remember what to do when

Do you have tasks you do everyday? Of course you do what homeschooling mum doesn't? You can easily realize the importance of setting your goals or creating a list of tasks that need to be completed.  As you complete and check off your list, a wave of satisfaction washes over you and end the day with a feeling of happiness and accomplishment.  Children desire to feel the same way about their daily tasks too.

Children can easily become creatures of habit - when honed and developed - this can become a good and positive thing. What do I mean by this, you ask. In our little homeschool, like many of yours, we do certain subjects on certain days. We have certain books we read from at certain times, and also have a host of tasks that easily become routine to us such as fixing our bed, practicing a musical instrument, reading the Bible daily, etc. Without really realizing it, we could find that we have lots of daily tasks that children feel a great sense of accomplishment in completing. Sometimes these tasks might be short lived such as memorizing a poem or passage, reading a book, going to swimming lessons twice a week, or practicing a homemaking skill such as a small embroidery project. Yet other tasks involve long term commitment such as daily piano practice, using flashcards daily, learning Latin, or keeping a journal.  When we know what to do and when to do it, the tasks become expected and finished in a more timely manner. 

Many eductaors believe that it is a good thing to help your children organize their learning and create a schedule of sorts.  This teaches them organizational skills as well as the most needed skill of time management. 

Our offering today is a years worth of weekly task check-off sheets for the kiddos to help in their home learning.  I have a young child who loves check lists and finds them such a wonderful tool.  She uses them in her cleaning and daily learning as well.  Last year in grade two she would write out her daily things to do for her learning.  This would take her a while, but I would just sit quietly and let her go.  This coming year I have created a template for her to use for those things which will need to be done a few times during the week.  She will get a sheet in the beginning of the week and keep it in her folder to check off daily.  I have created enough for each week in the school year to have a different theme.  This keeps the sheet fresh and warm for her.  There are special ones for holidays as well.  I thought that others may find these quite useful too as they could be used by writing in a task, chore, book title, subject to be covered or any of a number of things.

The sheets have a variety of colourful themes that can be used for unit studies, particular interests of the time, holidays etc.  Almost every theme set contains two sheets - one for a girl and one for a boy.  There are some larger multiple paged sets including various sports and cultures.  A cursive font has been used to help us transition into the reading and writing of cursive text.  The layout is simple and clear and allows for ten different tasks and includes space for the weekly dates.  You will also find that the sheets leave space for hole punching on the left hand side of the page for easy placement into a folder, duo-tang or other binding.

We hope you find these weekly task charts helpful in your learning year.

Click HERE to see our collection of Weekly Activities and Tasks Charts.

If you have a child who likes to check things off on a daily basis for each of their subjects, you could also try out one of our checklist style assignment sheets HERE.

Blessings,

Kalei