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Getting your children to help you out with cleaning or making sure they clean up their rooms can be another challenge altogether. However, there are a few cleanup games for kids that you can use to make a strategy and get your kids to be involved in the activity as well. Combining fun and household chores can bring happiness to everyone in various forms.
Fun Games to Get Your Children Involved in Cleaning
To help you get started with your kids in cleaning activities, we have put together a list of games that can provide you with the initial steps that are needed for this.
1. Clean to the Music
Make the usual cleaning and organising activities less boring by infusing them with energetic music.
How to Play
Pair this activity with one of the popular songs or any of your child’s favourites. Make sure this is an energetic one that can get them going. Pause the music intermittently. When the music stops, your kids need to freeze in place and stop cleaning. They resume immediately after you continue the music.
Aim of the Game
Combining music with cleaning activity can speed up the cleaning and keep your children excited without a chance to be bored. When done in a group, this can be quite fun for everyone.
2. Make an Advertisement
With the affinity the children of today have for videos, make an ad for how cleaning is done at your place.
How to Play
Let your kids be actors and choose which role they want to play. You are the director and the cameraman. Let them know that you would be shooting an advertisement in the house, based on different techniques to keep it clean. Advise your kids to appear happy on camera so that others know they like to clean their own home, too. Make the advertisement a little comical if you can.
Aim of the Game
Kids tend to hate cleaning around because it might not be “cool” enough for them. By turning the activity into an advertisement shoot of sorts, your kids will be conscious of retaining their best behaviour on camera and working single-mindedly towards doing it with a positive attitude.
3. Roll Your Chore
If your kids don’t like the work you assign them, let them choose it for themselves.
How to Play
Make a board similar to any popular board game with each square denoting an activity that needs to be done. Your kids can start from square one and roll the dice. Wherever they land, that is the chore they need to do. Some tasks could be done in groups if more than one kid lands on the same space.
Aim of the Game
Remove the factor of them refusing what you assign them. Gamifying the concept and making them responsible for their choices can work tremendously in your favour.
4. Dress Up and Clean
Who says you can’t be a doctor and help around in healing the house from the garbage?
How to Play
Let your child take on the role of any person he wishes. He could be a police officer who is here to arrest all the toys that have spread across the house and put them in the prison of toy cupboard. Your daughter could also be a fairy who is going to use her magic broom to sweep the house clean completely. The possibilities are endless.
Aim of the Game
Taking their mind off the activity of cleaning up the home and turning the entire task into a make-believe activity can keep them focused and happy while they are doing it.
5. Scavenger Hunt
Since everyone is going to be all around the house, it is best to hide some treasure for your kids, too.
How to Play
Prepare in advance by hiding small toffees or tiny gifts in specific areas of the house that are well-hidden. Let your kids know that there is treasure around the house. Tie this up with clues which each kid can get from you once they complete a specific activity.
Aim of the Game
The lure of hidden treasure can at least get your kids started and seeing others get clues before them can motivate them to be faster and efficient.
6. A Race for the Laundry
Even the utilise motivations can get your children to help you with washing their clothes.
How to Play
Set the rules that your children have to separate their clothes into coloured and whites, put them in separate bags, and bring them to the washing machine. Let them all start from the entrance of the house and then blow the whistle. The one who gets there first with everything done right is the winner.
Aim of the Game
A little bit of competition can go a long way in getting your children to do a simple task, which they might be procrastinating for the longest time.
7. Safe Zone
When things are scattered around the house, make organizing them simpler by getting them all together in one place.
How to Play
Tell your kids that the place is infected and all the toys and other things in the house are in danger of being destroyed. All that remains is a safe zone in the house, and your kids have to get all the objects that you’ve mentioned from different parts of the house into the safe zone.
Aim of the Game
Rather than hunting around the house for toys or clothes, you can have all of them in one place and then sort out stuff quite easily.
8. Cleaning Jenga
Remember the popular game Jenga? Well, you can pair that with your cleaning tasks quite effectively.
How to Play
Use a pencil and write all the household activities you need to do on the sticks. Assemble the Jenga blocks and create the tower. Now, let the kids start pulling out one block after the other without disturbing the tower. Any block they pull out might have a task which they need to complete.
Aim of the Game
Rather than being assigned a difficult task from you, your kids will opt for the task that the game might give.
9. Turn Your Kid Into a Robot
Welcome to the futuristic age where kids can obey your commands to the letter.
How to Play
Advise your child to listen to your commands exactly the way you tell them. Command them to turn right, walk five steps, pick up the toy, turn around, walk ten steps and place it in the box. By repeating the commands and making a few mistakes, your kid will have a lot of fun and you can get the task done as well.
Aim of the Game
Following the commands can help you finish any task and responding in a robot voice can be quite exciting for kids. You can recharge them intermittently by giving them a sip of juice or bite of a cookie.
10. Play I Spy
You don’t need a road trip for I-spy when you have a room to clean.
How to Play
Just like the usual, I Spy game, let your kids stand in one corner. Then you can announce “I Spy a green shirt”. Your kids can run to get the shirt and return it to you. Doing this with any task such as gathering laundry, dirty dishes, cleaning windows, can get tasks completed almost instantly.
Aim of the Game
The game helps your kids be more observant of the room and look for possible tasks that you might ask them to complete, helping you come up with tasks for them as well.
Factors that Can Help Motivate a Child to Take Up a Cleaning Task
There are a few major factors you ought to remember when you attempt to get your child to do a household cleaning task.
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Make It Fun
Keeping a task like a task is not going to get your kid excited about it. Tap into their interests, turn the task into a fun activity, and your kid will be eager to participate in it.
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Use Reasoning
Make use of what your kids want and utilize it to reason the need to finish an activity. Combining the fact that your child can have his friends come over but only after he cleans his room, can get him up on his feet and cleaning up his room right away.
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Give Rewards
Children can also be motivated to be encouraged and rewarded for doing the right thing. The rewards can be as simple as an extra cookie or being allowed to watch television for an additional 30 minutes or so.
With numerous clean up games for preschool kids, you can make sure you aren’t the only one completing the chores around the house. Household cleaning can quickly become a family activity, where everyone bonds together and has a great time they can always remember.
