Daily and Weekly Summer Routines Checklist
School’s out for summer! Now you get to fight the mess and the screen time without the built in structure of the school year. Even as teens, my kids need reminders to help them prioritize important daily and weekly tasks and routines. Here is a printable summer checklist for kids you can use to keep your kids on track this summer.
Whether your kids actually check off their tasks or you simply post it as a helpful reminder, this list will serve as a visual prompt of your summer expectations.
Daily Checklist
Left to their own devices (pun intended!), would your kids spend the day in pajamas, with unbrushed hair, surrounded by empty chip bags and banana peels while watching YouTube videos?
My daily checklist activities cover personal hygiene, exercise, tidying up, and spending time engaging with their “real” lives.
Personal Hygiene
This category is a reminder to brush teeth, brush hair, take a shower as needed, get dressed, trim nails, and anything else involved in taking care of their personal needs.
Devotional
During the school year, we were doing a scripture reading all together. Now that summer has started, we’ve shifted gears to accommodate a special reading plan for a few family members. Putting this on the checklist is a way to remind everyone to do their daily devotional reading.
Exercise
Movement is important for a healthy mind and body, so this category had to go on the daily checklist. It doesn’t matter what they do, any type of movement counts. Our gymnast is covered with the hours she spends in the gym, and our dancer adds yoga, bike rides, and walking to her dance schedule. Active games, trampoline time, Just Dance, obstacle courses, and walking the dog are some favorite ways for our kids to exercise.
10-Minute Bedroom Tidy
10 out of 10 parents agree that teens are oblivious to the socks, water bottles, scrunchies, and art supplies strewn across their bedroom floors. Are you in this thing with me!?
This category is a pretty low-key way to stay on top of the mess that happens the moment their room is clean enough to vacuum.
Your kids may want to choose a time, like 4pm, or a time of day, like right after lunch. Either way works, the goal is to shoot for consistency so you reap the benefit of habit building.
10-Minute Shared Space Tidy
This category covers the shared spaces your kids take over with random bits and bobs of clutter. It may be a kitchen island, living room couches and tables, or the shoes laying just inches from the conveniently placed shoe storage cubbies.
Talk to your kids about whether they prefer to combine the 10-minute bedroom tidy and the 10-minute shared space tidy for a total of 20 minutes all at once, or if they’d rather break it up.
Choose a time that most lends itself to consistency, turn on an upbeat playlist, and get tidying.
Engage Your Mind Off Screens
I love technology and encourage my kids to use the internet to explore their interests. What I don’t love is the mindless consumption of content that almost always happens without being intentional about how you are using screens.
This category is a daily reminder to not spend hours mindlessly consuming: social media, YouTube, TV, video games.
I want my kids to spend more time producing than consuming. Making, learning, thinking, playing, building, imagining, cooking, writing, testing, singing, dancing, practicing, creating.
Read a Book
I don’t put any time frames on this. Just take some time every day to read, or listen to, a book. Read on a couch, in a bed, on a swing, in a hammock, at a library, in the backyard, at a coffee shop, in the car, basically anywhere.
Audio books count. Picture books count. Fiction, nonfiction, it all counts. Reading opens up our minds to the world in a unique way and our kids shouldn’t think it’s “for school.”
Weekly Checklist
The weekly checklist for summer is pretty simple. Out of the ordinary weeks are ordinary during summertime. Between last-minute playdates, vacations, camps, and family fun, I want to keep our weekly task list doable.
Laundry
This task doesn’t change from school year to summer. I mean, they don’t suddenly stop wearing clothes, right? My 15, 13, and 11-year-olds do their own laundry, but they still need reminders. Not because they don’t know how, but because they don’t want to do it. Each family member has a laundry day, so there’s no excuse that someone else is hogging the machine and getting in their way.
Household Cleaning Chores
Rather than list specific chores for each child, I include this weekly reminder to participate in helping with household chores. The weekly cleaning is generally done on Saturday mornings using a separate checklist, and the expectation is that they will all help in getting those chores done.
Math Practice
My final weekly checklist activity is math practice. I know it’s revolting to most kids, but I try to keep it light and I’m pretty lenient about getting this done when we have a lot going on. I just know that my kids will forget so much if they don’t do any math for almost three months.
Big Picture Thinking
Along with the daily and weekly tasks, I included a question for my kids to think about every time they look at this checklist posted on the fridge.
At the end of the summer, what will I wish I had done?
One of my kids is especially averse to goal-setting, structure, planning, and any of the other things I’m passionate about 🤪. As a way to help her consider the big picture and work backwards to how she can get to where she wants to be, I try to ask questions. For kids, and even adults, it’s hard to be disciplined when no one is telling them what to do.
I hope this question helps motivate and inspire my kids to work on something they’ll be glad they spent time doing this summer.
Printable Summer Checklist
Depending on the personalities and ages of your kids, they may enjoy having time frames attached to some of these activities. For example, a 10-minute tidy might naturally be a just-before-dinner activity.
As your kids grow into teens or if your kids are free-spirited, anti-organization kind of kids (I have one of those), you may find it difficult to get them to buy into any type of schedule.
For my free spirit, her screen time or ability to go do fun things is somewhat dependent on following through on her checklist.
My advice is to get input from your kids before setting up a detailed plan and schedule for summer chores and expectations. The more choice your kids have in what they do and when they do it, the more likely they are to actually do the things!
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