Hey, guess what!  I am so very happy to report that we have checklists once again.  Yeah, baby!  Here's what happened.

I think I said in a previous post that we are doing "contracts" each month.  The kids decide exactly what and how much they will do per day or per week depending on the activity.  That isn't without some encouragement from me on certain points but I never tell them they must do one thing or another.  They are usually much harder on themselves than I would be on them but that isn't the point of this post.  Once they sign their contract they are responsible to complete it with my help to keep them accountable.

The problem was that they got tired of trying to remember what they had to do for the day.  They jotted down what they did each day in a notebook.  So they could go to the notebook to figure out what they had done for the week but they would have to go to the contract to figure out what was left to do.  The process was cumbersome.

Enter the checklist.

I have Homeschool Tracker Plus on my computer which is a great tool for keeping records and planning.  The kids thought they would really like having their tasks from the contracts printed in a list-form each week. 

For my son I divided each group of tasks evenly throughout the week so he can tell if he is  on track for the week with just a glance.  For my daughters, who are older than he is, I just started on Monday for each group of tasks so that Monday and Tuesday have fairly long lists but from Wednesday on, the lists get progressively shorter.  All of them know that they do not have to do any task on a given day just because it is on that day's list.   For instance, they could do all of the geography tasks on Monday or Thursday.  Or they could do one task on Monday and the rest of the week's tasks on Wednesday.  The only requirement is that all the tasks are done by Friday and that is not my requirement because the tasks come from their own contracts.

Because they are the ones who set the educational goals for themselves, they work amazingly harder than if I were the one to set the same goals.  Now that we have checklists to streamline the process, our school time is that much more productive.   ...and I am the happiest clam of all to see those boxes checked off!