Making Cleanup Child's Play

I was encouraged to expand upon a tweet that I left on twitter about making clean-up time seem like playing.

I have to admit that I sing the clean-up song (after giving the two-minute
warning, of course). Yesterday, however, I turned the actual putting-away into play. There were several empty jigsaw-puzzle frames and a big bag of miscellaneous jigsaw puzzle pieces that needed to find each other. Instead of telling the two preschoolers to clean up the puzzles, I asked them to see who could finish the most puzzles.

Of course, we were still left with a few missing pieces and when we searched the house for them, we attacked cluttered toy boxes and got rid of some junk. The task was never referred to as “organizing” or “straightening up;” we were simply on a mission to find the lost pieces and complete the puzzles.

While you can’t turn every organizing chore into a game, working with your kids to make it appear to be fun certainly makes it go more smoothly.

What do you do to make organizing less like work and more like fun? You can leave a comment here or you can follow me on twitter @organizedmarcie.

Organized by Marcie: Getting you organized so you have time to do what you love to do!