Posted on 01/27/2016
In any preschool, kindergarten, or elementary school classroom, you’ll find plenty of activities designed to help kids learn sorting and organizational skills. The younger groups will also be working on fine motor skills and providing sensory activities.
So what does that have to do with laundry? A lot, actually. We’re paying professional educators to do what we sometimes feel guilty about asking our kids to help us do at home! Now, I’m not against artificial means of teaching these skills, but let’s not be against the everyday, real-world experiences, either.
Classification
The basic math skill involves sorting similar items into groups. You can certainly do this via worksheets, but many educators recommend a Montessori-style, hands-on approach.
Laundry sorting can take many forms, but here are a few:
• Sort by person
• Sort by clothing type
• Sort by color
If your child is very young or easily overwhelmed, you may want to begin with only one type of clothing, such as socks.
Fine Motor Skills
Folding or rolling paper or hanging pretend clothes on a clothes line can certainly help your child develop fine motor skills — but so can actually folding clothes or hanging them up!
Other fine motor skills are directly linked to clothing: zipping, buttoning, and tying. You can experiment with your child using different ways of folding or rolling clothing.
Scientific Process
Could folding clothing differently actually allow you to put more items in a drawer? According to one T-shirt fan, a new way of folding T-shirts completely transformed over-stuffed drawers into organized spaces with plenty of room to spare. Perhaps you could employ the scientific method and see how different folding or rolling techniques can help reduce your over-crowding problem.
For younger kids, simply using a grid to track how many shirts various family members have or the prominence of certain colors in their wardrobe can provide an interesting step toward building those all-important STEM skills. After that, you could convert the data into a percentage or display it in a different format, such as a pie chart or bar graph.
Competition
Why not race your child (or have two siblings race each other) through the sorting, folding, and putting-away process? You might be surprised at how quickly it gets done. You might even want to make it interesting by offering a prize or some sort of incentive. Of course, you don’t want to sacrifice neatness and order for speed, so you’ll have to put out some kind of qualifier. Perhaps another family member could be the judge of the neatest drawers, and you could establish a points system that includes both speed and neatness.
Of course, laundry isn’t the only everyday avenue you can use to teach your kids life skills, but it’s one of them. And maybe you’ll end up feeling like the task is a bit less of a drudgery than you once did.
From the Bedroom Source blog:
- Making Furniture Decisions: Where Should You Start?
- Making Furniture Decisions: What Does Your Child Need?
- Making Furniture Decisions: Dresser or Drawer Chest?
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