What do we really mean by creating healthy habits for your kids? Here are 5 tips for creating healthy habits.
Research has shown that developing any new habit can take between 30 to 60 days.
Repetition helps to develop the good habit and once established, the new behavior will begin to occur naturally.
Over the course of our homeschool journey, I’ve realized that using habit-tracking charts can make a huge difference for successfully meeting our goals as a family.
Using the charts helps keep my children motivated and interested.
The different creative options help provide a fun visual representation of how far they’ve come and how much time or effort they must still expend.
They also help keep me on track; are we falling behind, have we forgotten to consistently practice an important skill? With a quick glance, I can easily see how our work is progressing.
5 tips for creating healthy habits for your kids
Here are some of our favourite habits to track.
- Reading: We love recording how many books we read over the span of the year. A great goal can be one book a day or an even loftier goal of 1,000 books for the year. Recently, we started keeping track of each chapter of the Bible, as my eldest has decided to read it from cover to cover!
- Savings: I love doing those envelope-type savings challenges. This year I am hoping to encourage the boys to start saving for some big-ticket items that they have been asking for. There is something especially thrilling about seeing your savings increasing!
- Outdoor time: Spending time in nature and getting active outdoors is an important part of our decision to homeschool. We all love the 1000 Hours Outside movement and enjoy picking a new beautiful tracker off their website at the start of every new year.
- Exercise: Thanks to some badges the boys are hoping to earn in boy scouts, they have asked for exercise trackers! Now they have something concrete to take back to class and you can easily see how they’ve improved over time. This is a great idea for sports, dance and other extra curricula activities too. I can definitely see the benefit of using one for tracking piano practice or swimming and running laps.
- Chores: Having a visual representation of our chore charts has certainly made my life a little easier. Instead of asking about every single task, every single day, I can now ask if they have completed all their daily tasks. They know what is expected and what they are responsible for and our entire day can run smoother.
Celebrating progress
We love looking at our completed or even almost completed trackers at the end of each year.
They are a wonderful reminder of the work we are doing, the progress we have made, and the good habits we have cultivated.
Let us know if you try these 5 tips for creating healthy habits for your kids.
