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One for all and all for a tidy room

5 Ways to Make Chores Fun for Preschool Age Children

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Involving children in household chores at the preschool age has many potential benefits. Gaining a sense of responsibility, independence, self-reliance, and empathy are just a few of the developmental breakthroughs that can occur as a result of your children participating in their household chores. Not only will it help you out by having one less thing on your to-do list, but it will help your preschool age children learn skills that will last a lifetime, including time management, task prioritization, and basic organization techniques.

Luckily, chores don’t have to be a drag! You can turn them into fun games and activities that your preschooler will love! Here are a few ideas that will get preschool age children started on their chores:

  1. Play the Freeze Dance Pick Up Game. Children at the preschool age are old enough to put away their own toys, but most kids don’t have as much fun putting them away as they did taking them out. The solution is turning this tidying up chore into a fun and interactive game of freeze dance. Blast your child’s favorite upbeat song as they dance and put as many toys away as possible while the music plays. When the music stops, well – you know the drill.
  2. Film a cleaning commercial. Whip out your smartphone or video camera next time there’s a spill and tell your kids that they are going to be the star of a new cleaning commercial! Hand them a wet towel and the cleaning product in a spray bottle (of course you’ll want to make sure that it’s a gentle one without any strong chemicals or fumes) and start filming away as they wipe up that mess!
  3. Kick off a laundry race. Make sure you have a few laundry baskets ready because your children will be eager to play this cleaning game. Blow your whistle and shout whites, colors, or darks! Your children will be racing to their rooms as fast as they can to grab their dirty laundry and come back with the color that you requested.
  4. Play cleaning Jenga. Here’s where you can really get creative by writing an age-appropriate chore on the side of each log in the Jenga stack. Your child will be directed by the cleaning activity written on the side of the log that caused the stack to fall.
  5. Hold a tidying contest. This one is all about speed. Who can tidy up their mess the fastest? You can make a scoreboard. Record all the times and give them the opportunity to beat their previous times, or the times of their friends and siblings. This is a great way to incorporate a little friendly competition and get the job done fast!

How Chores Help the Learning Process at the Preschool Age

At Carpe Diem Private Preschool, we use an interdisciplinary approach to learning in which children learn through doing and reflecting. Our experiential learning process helps children build character and leadership, as well as gross motor skills. We believe that involving your preschool age child in chores at home is a great way to continue this experiential learning process outside of the classroom environment.

 

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How to Get Your Tot to Be Tidy

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Nothing is more frustrating than coming home from a long day and finding your child’s room a complete mess. With toys and clothes scattered everywhere around the room, it’s hard not to lose your mind right then and there. Thankfully, there’s another option – just teach your child to clean the clutter themselves!

5 Ways to get your tot to be tidy

Keep things at a child’s level. Looking at things from your child’s eye level will give you a better perspective on how to help them get organized. For example, closet hanging rods may be out of reach for your little ones, so lowering the rod and accompanying it with child-sized hangers will make it easier for them to put away his own clothing and keep the closet organized.  It’s also important to make sure that things like cubbies and dresser drawers are at their level so they can put things away on their own.

Teach your child organizational skills. Instead of getting mad at your children for leaving their room a total mess, teach them skills and maintenance methods that they can use to organize their room. This will allow them to adopt efficient ways to keep their room clean on a daily basis. One way to do this is to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not working for them. Also, be sure to know what is important to your child so you can explain to them why staying organized is important in a way that is meaningful to them.  For example, if they are frustrated because they can’t find a favorite toy, be sure to use that as an opportunity to explain how being organized and putting things back where they belong can help them find their things more easily!

Create a system.  Sorting, storing, and simplifying will make it so much easier for your child to keep their room organized. Start by keeping clothing sorted according to style and season. For example, you can keep all pants in one drawer and all shirts in a separate drawer. Things like jackets and hoodies can be stored in the back of the closet, under the bed, or on higher shelves during the summer months when your child won’t be using them.

Label everything. Printing out photos of the inside contents of a drawer and slapping them on the outside of each corresponding drawer, will help remind your child of where each item belongs. You can also put them on the inside of toy boxes or storage containers so if they decide to dump the stuff out, they will still know where everything goes back by looking at the photo inside.

Make a maintenance routine. Creating a regular routine can help your child stay organized and not feel overwhelmed. It’s usually a good idea to break things up according to time of day. So you can assign tasks like making the bed and putting dirty clothes in the hamper as the “morning pickup” and tasks like putting toys away and getting their outfits ready for the next day as the “evening pickup.”

Our Take

At Carpe Diem, our aim is to create an invigorating and orderly environment for your child. We believe that this kind of balanced environment leads to inspiring thoughts and good habits that will follow them into the future. That is why we keep all of the materials in our classrooms at “child level” – not the teacher’s /adult level. We know that when a child gets things and puts them away by themselves they are experiencing independence, which is a fundamental part of child development.