An Alliterative Weekday System for Summer Chores (Plus: My Six-Week Summertime Sampler)

However you mark the start of summer — the solstice, Memorial Day, or simply “the day school lets out” — it’s here, and your schedule is about to look nothing like it did in April. Later mornings, later nights, way more coming and going, and yes, probably a little more boredom sprinkled in. Some of that is exactly the point of summer, and letting the house go a bit is completely fine.

But if you’ve ever thought “I really should use this looser summer schedule to actually teach my kids some of this stuff,” this one’s for you.

Every Summer Approach Is a Valid One

Some of us are the planned-ahead type — camps booked back in February, VBS on the calendar, the family vacation and the grandparents’ visit already penciled in. Others are winging it, figuring out the pool schedule and library programs as June unfolds. And plenty of us are both at once: relaxed and unstructured most days, while also carrying this nagging feeling that summer is the moment to finally teach the kids to do their own laundry.

That last one is a familiar trap. During the school year, it’s always faster to just throw the load in yourself, or do it after everyone’s in bed, or do it while they’re at practice. Teaching a kid to do laundry takes twice as long and comes with its own frustrations, so it never quite happens — until summer opens up the time to actually slow down and show them.

A Loose, Alliterative Weekly Theme (Not a Daily Checklist)

Here’s a system that worked well across plenty of summers with four kids: instead of a strict daily chore checklist, give each day of the week its own loose focus. It’s not about demanding perfection every day — it’s about giving yourself, and them, one manageable thing to concentrate on without feeling like the whole summer became one long chore-teaching marathon.

Make Your Bed Mondays — Beds get made on Mondays, no stress about the rest of the week. This is also a great day to change sheets, since it gives you the built-in time to actually walk them through stripping a bed, wrestling with a fitted sheet, and getting it to the laundry — skills that get very real value the first time they’re making a bed shoved into a dorm-room corner.

Tackle the Bathroom Tuesdays — Rotate responsibility for one part of the bathroom each week: sink one week, tub the next, then the toilet, then towels and a quick floor vacuum. With multiple kids sharing a bathroom, that rotation might mean any one kid only faces toilet duty a couple of times all summer — but the bathroom itself gets attention every single week, and nobody’s overwhelmed by the whole room at once.

Wash Day Wednesdays — The easiest version of laundry day skips sorting by color entirely and instead has each kid run their own load, oldest to youngest, cycling through the machine one after another. (A word of caution: this works because everyone’s clothes were fairly low-maintenance — don’t toss a delicate white dress in with a grubby red t-shirt if your situation calls for more care.) Set a timer for the wash, a timer for the dryer, and walk them through folding or hanging when it’s done. Because it’s the only task on deck that day, there’s no competing pressure to also be fussing over bathrooms or beds — just one full day, one focus, one lesson at a time.

Tech-Free Thursdays — A window — even just 2 to 4 p.m. — with no screens, spent instead on puzzles, games, time outside, or time in their room. That room time often turns into unplanned rediscovery: kids realizing there’s a whole shelf of things they haven’t touched in months, deciding what they don’t want anymore, or lobbying to bring a beloved Lego set back out because now they’ve got the tech-free time to actually use it.

Fun Fridays — Reserved for whatever’s free and happening locally — a park program, a library event, anything that takes advantage of what your community already offers.

The beauty of this kind of loose theming is that it doesn’t ask for strict daily adherence. It gives you room to supervise one focused task a day rather than trying to teach every chore at once, and by the end of the summer — six weeks, twelve weeks, however long you’ve got before school starts again — you may be surprised how much genuinely sticks. It doesn’t have to be consistent to work. Kids who got this kind of scattered, imperfect exposure to chores still grow up knowing how to do their own laundry, clean a bathroom, and cook for themselves — it just doesn’t have to happen on a perfect schedule to land.

If you try a version of this and want to share what worked for your family, I’d love to hear it — DM me on Instagram @joylovinghome, email joy@joylovinghome.com, or drop a photo in the free Facebook community at bit.ly/joylovinghomecommunity. I may put together a follow-up post with reader ideas.

For the Grown-Up Fish Brains: The Six-Week Summertime Sampler

If this kind of themed, low-pressure structure sounds appealing for you, not just the kids, I’m running something new this summer: a six-week Summertime Sampler.

Here’s how it works — my regular membership is on pause for June, July, and August, and in its place is a one-time, $10 flat payment (charged once, never again) that gets you into a private Facebook group running only for the summer. It’s a week-on, week-off format, so it spans 12 weeks total but only six of them are “active” weeks with a themed project.

Each active week follows its own loose daily rhythm:

• Motion & Maintenance Mondays — I introduce that week’s theme and we knock out some baseline maintenance together for a little body-doubling accountability.
• Tackle It Tuesdays — An open Zoom call running 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. (covering every time zone), where you pop in and out for as little as 15 minutes or as long as you like, working on your own space.
• Work With Me Wednesdays — A recorded live session going deeper into that week’s project, so you can watch anytime that works for you.
• Think About It Thursdays — Send in a photo or question and I’ll answer it in a Thursday Q&A.
• Finish It Fridays — Post your before-and-after to celebrate what got done.

It’s intentionally loose — come and go as your schedule allows, and if you’re on vacation during one of the active weeks, the recordings are there whenever you’re ready. If a theme really clicks for you, nothing stops you from applying it to a second space the following week too.

If you’ve been curious about my membership but didn’t want an ongoing monthly charge, this is a low-commitment way to try the format. You can find all the details and sign up at joylovinghome.myflowdesk.com/summer.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.