Spring cleaning - simple ways to engage kids with the chores

This guest post is written by Alex Farley who loves to write alongside running her business and here is sharing her ideas for engaging your children with the traditional Spring Cleaning. This post contains a link to Alex’s cleaning company, but please note Navigating Baby has not used its services and has not been paid for including this post. We did so as we thought it would be interesting to our readers.

Wave goodbye to winter and say hello to spring! According to old customs now is the time to do some spring cleaning! Below are some simple ways to honour that tradition and engage your kids with chores at the same time

Spring Equinox Ritual

What better way to teach your children and engage them with the spring cleaning that talking to them about ancient folk beliefs and describing a spring festival to welcome the new season?!

This time of year is a perfect opportunity to sit down for a lesson in cultural studies and introduce your children to different nationalities and their traditions.

Who said that teaching has to happen in a classroom? Or that cleaning has to be boring? You can use the idea of spring cleaning to delve into folklore and mythology with your children and capture their imagination whilst doing the chores. You can make that Spring cleaning session into a mystical ritual for cleansing your home from the evil spirits of winter. Make it entertaining to make the lesson stick!

Break a spell game

What do kids love most? Why, it’s make believe, of course! You can use that to your advantage and come up with a story about how your home is under a get dirty spell. They can go on a cleaning mission to break the spell and free the house from being dirty! You can write a simple to-do list of chores that they, the magician cleaners, could do and then set them off. You could even spice things up by making it a race against time and throw in some lessons about team working by encouraging them to help one another and achieve together. Kids are naturally competitive so they will no doubt love racing against the clock!

Sing and Dance your way through it

Why not turn it into a musical? It would make the whole experience so much more pleasant both for you and your children. Everything is better with music!

Write a script
Assign roles
Even dress up

Make up a dance sequence and a cleaning song you can perform while cleaning room after room. To have even more fun you can record it and watch the video later. This will surely be a fun afternoon with a great sense of accomplishment at the end!

Your kids will feel like Hollywood stars!

After the work is finished you can congratulate them for the good results with a mini award ceremony of your own. Making sure that everybody feels acknowledged with a small treat!

The big clear out!

Spring is the perfect time to declutter your home from old unnecessary possessions and clothes that no longer fit. You can get your kids involved in this to, by starting a sorting challenge and separating the things you want to keep from the ones you have no use of anymore. You might find items that are good enough to sell so then it’s time to make your kids the photographers and sales consultants (if they can write then they can help to do the sales adverts). Then start uploading to relevant facebook sales pages or ebay. This is a great way to teach your children some organization skills and kickstart a useful routine of tidying up. It is also useful for teaching them about money as you can allow them to keep any money earnt and use it to buy a new toy.

A great motivator for next time would be to take some pictures of how everything looks once it is sorted out. You can use them as a reminder of what you managed to accomplish together. Your children will feel like winners!

You could also think about asking your kid to take a careful look at his belongings and decide which things they no longer need. The ones they’re willing to let go off could be donated to a charity and this way you’ll attach a whole new meaning to cleaning. One that will make your kid feel useful like never before and this will reflect in their self-esteem in a positive way as well as teaching them about helping others.

With all that in mind, remember that Spring Cleaning is supposed to be a much more thorough job than regular cleaning, which means that extra time and efforts will be required for quality results. Remember to consider age when planning the tasks for your children and break down the work into manageable chunks that you can easily handle instead of trying to do it all in one go. If you hurry things up and overburden your children, you’ll only demotivate them. Cleaning offers many valuable lessons for the young ones but they will learn them only if you use the right incentives.