– to be washed.
Daisy’s found a white towel, white towel, white towel
Daisy’s found a white towel – to be washed
Set up a mini laundrette in the kitchen while the washing machine does its thing. Most small children will love to handwash dolls’ clothes in a bowl of warm soapy water. Put an old towel down underneath to prevent slips.
Let them have fun folding things – small towels, pillowcases and tea towels are great items with which to practise. Just don’t expect precision corners.
Secure a length of string at each end, to two chairs perhaps, at your child’s shoulder height and let them peg out the socks.
Get to know some laundry-themed stories to recount to each other while doing the laundry. Or your little one could ‘read’ you the story from the book itself.
Laundry-themed picture books
Here are a few of our favourites:
Mrs Mopple’s Washing Line – Anita Hewett
Bare Bear – Miriam Moss and Mary McQuillan
Pants – Giles Andreae and Nick Sharratt
The Queen’s Knickers – Nicholas Allan
The Smartest Giant in Town – Julia Donaldson
Paddington: Trouble at the Laundrette – Michael Bond
Mrs Lather’s Laundry – Allan Ahlberg
Dusting
Children, armed with their own cloth or feather duster, will love following you around, copying you while you dust. Best not to put any cleaning product on their cloth though.
Pop on a motivational tune and see if you can finish the room by the end of the song. Here are a few of our favourites:
‘Heroes’ – David Bowie
‘Take on Me’ – a-ha
‘Jump Around’ – House of Pain
‘Give it Up’ – KC and the Sunshine Band
‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ – Queen
Try singing this song while dusting a room; it’s adapted from the Disney film
Peter Pan:
We’re following the leader
We’re following the leader, the leader, the leader
We’re following the leader wherever (s)he may be
We’re gonna dust the table, the table, the table*
We’re gonna dust the table wherever it may be
Vacuuming
When they were very young, my own children were scared of our vacuum cleaner – so much so that one of us used to vacuum while the other took them out for a walk! But some children like the noise and some babies are even soothed by it so much that they fall asleep to it, apparently.
To make the vacuum cleaner more appealing, why not turn it into a hungry, crumb-eating creature by giving it a face. Just add some googly eyes, paper or craft foam brows, ears and nose with some double-sided sticky tape (or Blu-tack for less permanence) just where your little one thinks they should go.
Every time the vacuum cleaner needs to come out, say it’s time for another ‘Adventure with the Crumb-Eating Creature’. The children will love helping with the story (shouting it out above the noise) about where it needs to go to today, what it will eat, and how it has to go to bed when the cleaning is finished.
You can buy a range of toy vacuum cleaners (these are very popular with most preschoolers), but if you don’t want that expense you could simply raid the recycling box for tubes and boxes and, sticking them together with some heavy duty gaffer tape, help your child make their own mini vacuum cleaner. Your children will love copying you with their own scaled-down, lightweight model. I have also seen some children as young as four using a hand-held dust-buster most effectively. If you feel your child is up to this, let them have a go (closely supervising them, of course) and enjoy the fact that they will actually be effectively contributing to getting the carpet clean. (For other details of junk modelling using recycled materials, see
here.)
Sweeping the floor
Sweeping is actually quite a complex task that requires a great deal of dexterity and coordination. It’s unlikely that a child under five will be able to achieve what we might call effective sweeping but this doesn’t mean it can’t be a way to play. Usually, soon after the sweeping action is explored, young children drift to playing with the broom in an altogether different way; I am of course talking about using it like a horse, or a balance beam, or if they’ve had any exposure to witches in stories such as Julia Donaldson’s brilliant Room on the Broom – they’ll be flying round the room on it. Or maybe they’ve just seen you being particularly playful with your broom at some point, and are just copying what they’ve seen.
Invest in a miniature (but effective) broom and dustpan set – otherwise you’ll end up tussling over ownership far more than sweeping or playing. Recently I read that just a few years ago, Montessori teachers in the US – who promote sweeping as an important developmental play opportunity for young children – had great difficulty in finding miniature, non-gendered brooms in natural materials – in fact they worked with a manufacturer to enable the making of such ‘specialist’ brooms to be continued. It’s amazing how many good-quality miniature sets are available now, and it means that if your child insists on using the grown-up version, you can still carry out the task effectively while your child is copying you, albeit with equipment on a scale that makes you feel like a giant.
You can have fun mixing up the order of the three parts of the sweeping process by using a song to help you do it right while you and your little one sweep:
Sweep the dirt (sung to the tune of ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’)
Sweep the dirt into a pile, to a pile (repeat)
Sweep and sweep and sweep and sweep
Sweep the dirt into a pile, into a pile.
Push the pile into the pan, into the pan (repeat)
Push and push and
