Printable chore chart

A chore chart printed with jobs already on it is a chart most families have to cross half of. What counts as a job here depends on whether there is a dishwasher, a dog, a garden or a baby, and it changes every few months anyway — so the left column is a parent's own words, written in pencil the first week and in pen once they have settled. Ten rows is more than most weeks need, and a chart with four jobs on it and six rows spare is exactly what a growing list wants.

The day columns are a box wide rather than a line long, and that is what makes the chart maintainable by a five-year-old. A tick is a mark anyone can make; a chart that asks for a word or an initial is one an adult ends up filling in at the end of the week from memory, which is a record of what the adult remembers rather than of what was done.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.