Earn Your Screen Time Chart

22

Jun

Summer break is officially on in our house and while we’ve all been home together for so long at this point I’m going to be making a few changes this summer to our routine. The biggest change is going to be to be how we spend our mornings and we’ll be using an “Earn Your Screen Time Chart”. During the pandemic, like most parents our screen time rules went out the window and I’m totally ok with that. But now that life is resuming again I’m ready to put more limits on how much time my kids spend in front of screens.

For the better part of a year my girls: wake up early, grab a “happy bar”, unplug their iPads and settle in on the couch for a while. Meanwhile I fix my coffee, grab my laptop, turn on The Today Show and accomplish an hour of productive work. It’s kind of ideal, but then when rest time rolls around and I have calls or work to get done I turn to those iPads again. And then when everyone is cranky after a long day and I’m trying to make dinner I turn on “just one show” again. You see the pattern. And with few excuses not to be spending the majority of our day outside enjoying the summer season I’m putting an end to it!

Enter the “Earn Your Screen Time Chart”. I’m really eager to see how this will work with my girls. Not everything I try works for us long-term (case in point: the bedtime pass) and I’m always open to sharing our experiences in the hopes that they help other mamas!

You can grab the free download for the “earn your screen time chart” here, it also comes with some other fun printables, all from my company, Magic Playbook. This is an open-ended chart so there are multiple ways to use it and you can adapt it to your own needs. You can laminate it (my favorite laminator) and use a dry-erase marker on it, print it off and cut it into strips to use as a pass that you punch holes in. Write different tasks on it and have your kids use a dot marker or stamp each time they complete one. I laminated ours and then cut it into strips. I put them in a little pocket on our bulletin board but may lower it so the kids have better access to it.

Here are some of the items I’m having my girls do to earn their screen time:
+Empty the dishwasher
+Feed and take out the dog
+Clean up their room
+Spend 15 minutes doing Osmo learning or Piper’s school program iReady on the computer
+Read 2 books to me (for Piper)
+Practice handwriting
+Do a page in their workbooks
+Help me with Alice


So now in the mornings iPads are out of the picture – instead I’m setting out a basket of activity books, rotating different games and prompts for play and setting up a few different educational breakfast invitations during the week. We’ve only been in our new routine for a few days, but it’s going great and I can’t wait to see how it helps us in the long-run!

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