My MOTH Schedule

After 7+ years of homeschooling and hearing boat loads of recommendations, I finally broke down and bought the MOTH book. In case you aren't a homeschooler or are a homeschooler who lives in a cave, MOTH stands for Managers of Their Homes. It is a "how to" scheduling book written by Steve and Teri Maxwell - business owners, convention speakers, and a homeschooling family of 8 children.

I guess you have to know me to understand what a HUGE leap this was. I have always been more of a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of girl with an unwritten schedule floating around in my head. I have a rough plan for our days, but the idea of a rigid schedule is frightening and a little suffocating.

This year however, I am teaching 3 different grades at home as well as a co op class on Fridays, shuffling the girls to field trips and club meetings and taking care of our maniacal (yet somewhat better trained than last year) dog. Somewhere in all that craziness, I needed to fit in personal time (you know - time for Bible reading, exercising and showering) and at least make an attempt at cleaning the house. Add to that my own leanings toward ADHD, an ADD husband and at least one ADHD daughter and you can imagine the fun we can have around our house without a routine in place. We decided that if the Maxwells could run a business and homeschool their children while maintaining their sanity - they were probably the ones I needed to go to for help.

I haven't ironed out all the kinks yet, but here is the rough draft of our new schedule (in case you were interested). The white spaces in the middle of the third/Evening sheet are free time. I wanted to leave myself some wiggle room in case school went longer than I anticipated or there was some other interruption to our day.


Morning / Midday / Evening


Now all I have to do is FOLLOW the schedule and we'll be good to go.

Writing the schedule wasn't all that difficult. The idea is to make a list of all the things you need to do in a day/week, assign each task a block of time (typically 1/2 or 1 hour) and then fit them all on your schedule like a giant puzzle. The book was great because Teri gave lots of good advice about how to handle various scheduling issues, getting your children to work together and getting the dreaded chores finished. She also did a great job reminding me about what my priorities are - something I often forget when life gets too busy.

As I said, the process was not difficult, but it was time consuming. However thinking it through in this manner helped me plan for our weak areas - namely, what I want two of the girls to do while I'm working with the third. "Go play in the other room" just wasn't cutting it anymore! Right now I'm working on planning activities for the girls to do together during that time - like movies, legos, playdoh, drawing, etc so they have a little direction to their playtime. I was also able to schedule computer time for everyone (so I don't have to answer that question 100 times each day) and there was even time left over for an hour of family fun each night.

I'm just saying a prayer that it will all work!

I always thought the MOTH book was a little too expensive, but honestly, it will be worth every penny if it brings some semblance of order to our house and cuts out just 50% of the "what are we doing next?" questions.

Another day, another chart

This is the girls' weekly chore chart. This week Sydney (9.5 yrs) is responsible for filling and emptying the dishwasher, starting a load of laundry and putting the clean clothes into the dryer and straightening the bookshelves. Delaney (6) is in charge of table clean up (which includes the floor), taking the clothes out of the dryer, and feeding the dog. Sadey (3.5) helps me empty the waste paper baskets. The photos are attached with velcro so we can rearrange on a weekly basis and can add/remove chores as needed.

Our new cleaning chart

This is the first of a few new cleaning charts I devised after being inspired by MeckMom. I have one for the general room cleaning, one for each of the girls' bedrooms and a third chart for toys.

This is our main room cleaning chart. It has pictures of all the rooms in the house that I want the girls to help clean and an envelope to hold the various jobs they will be doing. The week starts with all 5 rooms on the "To Do" side. One of my two older girls turns away from the chart while the other arranges the rooms in any order she wants. Then the other girl, who is still turned away from the board, chooses a number from 1-5 and that's the room we clean for the day. When the room is finished, the picture gets moved to the "Done" side and the next day we'll have 4 rooms to choose from.

After we pick the room, we remove the jobs from the job envelope.

There are several jobs in the envelope - sweeping, dusting, vacuuming, mopping, cleaning the mirrors, straightening book shelves, etc. We first have to decide which jobs apply to our room of the day and then we flip them over so we can't see the pictures, mix them up and choose our job. Not everything that has to be done is pictured. I just chose some major tasks that can be done by anyone or with minimal help from me. The 3yo also chooses a job, only she is my "helper" for that task. The remaining jobs are assigned by me as-needed and according to age/skill level.

Some weeks we will shift focus and do a light basic cleaning and work on cleaning the closet or washing baseboards, windows or the walls. We don't clean EVERYTHING, every week or we'd all get burned out. This method assures that the house gets a good cleaning each week and a thorough cleaning each month. My girls like the "game" aspect of this system and whatever makes cleaning more fun for them, definitely makes it more fun for me.