100 Days, Chores, and Movie Night

Emma's 100th day of school was on Monday - the teacher requested that each student bring in 100 of something. Somewhat inspired by the Fancy Nancy 100th day of school book, we made a poster - 25 beads of 4 different colors to make a rainbow of 100 beads. Emma did all the counting with me as we made it and she chose the colors. I did a lot of hot gluing...



We have had many a chore system in our home, and from this I've learned that they need to be changed up often to keep the kids excited - and especially as the kids get older, their abilities to help out around the house are constantly growing - which is very exciting to me! Our latest chore system is pretty simple... this one was all Ben's idea. Each girl has 2 chores they do every day, 3 chores they do once during the week, and then a list of extra chores they can pick from. We're just doing this Monday-Friday. I know a lot of families do their heavy chore days on Saturdays, but for now I have a much easier time motivating the kids to work on school days than I do on our fun weekends when daddy is home to play. So, on Friday, the girls just need to have 15 points to participate in Family Movie Night! For now, that's the big reward for working throughout the week. The last few weeks we've watched How to Train your Dragon, Despicable Me, Nanny McPhee Returns, and last night we watched Shrek 4 (holy cow... why did they make FOUR Shrek movies?!). I think I'd like to have a little treat jar too, so for each point they receive above the 15 point goal, they can pick out little pieces of candies to have during our movie as well. Just to motivate them to do more than what's required, if they feel so inclined. :)

I've printed these out (and saved the file, of course, so I can easily change up the chores on the lists when needed), put them in sheet protectors and put them on the fridge where the girls can easily see them. We're using a dry erase marker throughout the week and then they can be wiped clean for the next Monday.

We're having the girls trade off each week picking a dessert to have during our movie night. Becca picked chocolate chip cookies for last night... always yummy.

I remembered that my brother showed me how easy it is to pop your own popcorn in a saucepan on the stove. It's starting to make me wonder why we all think we need popcorn poppers. So, if you don't have a popcorn popper - just buy a bag of popcorn kernels from the grocery store and on the back of the bag it gives instructions for popping popcorn on the stove. It took less than 5 minutes to pop plenty for all of us! We melted a couple tablespoons of butter to pour on and sprinkled on a small amount of salt... yum! We usually do microwave bags of popcorn, and this was definitely better - and much cheaper - oh, and more fun! So there's my tip for the day. haha