Service Opportunities – An Upgrade

Part Three of Chores or Service Opportunities?

We have a system of Service Opportunities in place for our children to earn money.  The system allows us to pay a pre-determined amount of money for common household chores. (See The Habit of Rewarding Service)

A common problem with this method is that a child will perform a Service Opportunity, and then tell Hodgepodgemom about it.  Hodgepodgemom would keep the tally and pass it on for me to calculate the amount of money earned by each child.  Sometimes, though, Hodgepodgemom was busy with other things and would forget to record the task in the child’s Service Opportunity tally.  The fact that the task was done thus gets forgotten.

Knowing that this was a problem, we set out to develop a new way to track Service Opportunities.

Enter the Service Opportunities chalkboard and accompanying tally clipboard.

During the classroom renovation, Hodgepodgemom was setting up art supplies in the laundry room.

While waiting for the chalkboard paint to dry on the classroom desktop, she saw the blank section of wall where we used to have the Doorposts Stewardship Street visual taped up.  Since she had seen just how little of the chalkboard paint was needed to cover a fairly large area, she began to envision many things that could be done with it.

With a laundry room chalkboard, the children can have a visual.  They can see the service opportunities available and choose.  They mark their own tallies on the clipboard I hung up. They can see the tallies totaled.

The Stewardship Street poster returned to the wall, atop the new chalkboard section.

A practical solution.  So far, it’s working well.  Slowly working its way into becoming a habit.  Service Opportunities right in the main room of service–the laundry room.  It’s even an opportunity to review those bible verses that go along with Stewardship Street.

If you’d like to make your own chalkboard, the steps are fairly simple. Purchase chalkboard paint at your local hardware store. Decide where you’d like your chalkboard to go.

Measure and section off your area with painter’s tape. Ours took two coats. Four hours for the first coat to dry. In about six hours total, our chalkboard was ready to use.

It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom… Galatians 5:13

If you missed last year’s series:

Part One – Chores or Service Opportunities – In our home, we have basic expectations for everyone. Make your bed. Pick up after yourself. Clear your spot at the table. Maintain your jurisdiction. Most things above and beyond the basics we will gladly PAY to be done. Paid jobs are called service opportunities.

Part Two: The Habit of Rewarding Service – how we categorize and my downloadable template. “The bible clearly links work with material gain.  It also links work to our very sustenance (2 Thes. 3:10-12)”

Our recent school room makeover: All Things Chalkboard

An application of Service Opportunities in Saturday Morning Mathematics