If you have school age children you are very familiar with agendas, projects, dictation, reading lists and the myriad of tasks that come home for the children to accomplish. You probably even monitor that your children sit down and do homework each evening in order to get through the list. Maybe you go as far as to check that they have the due dates in their agendas.
Have you ever taught them how to write the To List so that it gets done?
Try teaching your children to write their To Do’s with action verbs up front. For example:
“Project Outline” becomes
“Write rough copy of project outline”.
The task is clear and limited. You will both know what needs to be done and when it got accomplished.