The new year is a great time to teach and inherit good habits, and cleaning up is a great way to start the year fresh and without the old clutter. Here are a few tips to get kids involved in keeping the house clean while maintaining a fun atmosphere.
Providing kid-sized brooms or mops makes the chore cute and fun! It’s a sweet and involved way to interact with your child while cleaning, and smaller-sized implements are easier for children to maneuver. Investing in a tiny broom or dustpan teaches kids good cleaning habits early on and makes them feel special.
Cleaning Games
• Pretend the cleaning is a “mission.” It’s a fun way to put everyone on their fastest cleaning work.
• Using a simple timer or stopwatch as a motivator. For example, make a game of putting away as many toys as you can find of a certain color or shape or type before the timer runs out. Or see who can get 10 toys off the floor first. Or see who can put away three dishes the fastest.
• Role-play Cinderella by dressing up in rags while cleaning up. Singing is another fun thing to do while cleaning.
• Tape a square outlining one of the tiles in the room, and have kids push all the dust into the square. This gives kids a concrete and tangible location to direct the sweeping— same goes for raking leaves outside. Just use a rope to make the target spot.
• Draw a bunny face on an old sock using permanent marker, then give the kids a “dust bunny” to catch dust bunnies around the house.
Cleaning with children help develops a sense of responsibility and respect for the place they inhabit.
