5 Sneaky Ways to Teach Your Children Organizational Habits

Wouldn’t it be nice if children were born having organizational skills? Your infant would fold their own laundry and set their timely sleeping/eating schedule to be the same everyday. While they aren’t born that way, I believe that most children can benefit from being taught organizational skills. Here are a few sneaky ways to help the whole family enjoy learning organizing habits.

{Photo Credit: thegospelcoalition.org}

Play The Memory Game: A lot of organizing is grouping like items.  What better way to learn how to group similar items than The Memory Game! If this seems a bit young for your children, then take this game to the next level by hiding one of each pair throughout the house.  Each player gets to pick one card from the pile then has 1 minute to search for the match.

Make labels stickers: Have your children make their own stickers for their toy containers, school supplies, or clothing bins. Use contact paper, duck tape, magazine cut outs, crayons, markers, anything to make this their creation.  I find when you engage young children in this process they are more willing to find that particular container to put away their specific items.

The Amazing Toy Race: Pairing parent against child, you battle it out to see who can find the item first. An example might be, find the “B” wooden block or the Elmo book.   The team to find the item gets 1 point. The first team to 5 points wins the right to pick the evenings activity, choose dessert, have breakfast in bed, or another celebratory honor. This is a great game to show how easy it is to find something when it is put back where it belongs.

Work on a Puzzle:  The jumble of small pieces can be intimidating but it is so neat to see a beautiful image appear out of the pile.  This is a great example of how arranging things in certain ways can produce art worthy results.

Bake a Cake: I have written about this before but will mention it again because I’m pretty sure most kids like cake. Using a recipe to do something a little overwhelming is a great illustration of how breaking a project into small steps will result in big things (like cake).

Hope these ideas help create some new habits! Please comment below, I love hearing your thoughts!

Daily Prompt: Teaching