Simple Strategy to Get Your Kids to Clean Up

Do you wish you could motivate your kids to clean up their toys and do it rather quickly? Tired of picking up the floor throughout the day and wish your kids would do a better job? Cleaning up with kids can be such a chore! Our kids love to whine and complain when we ask them to clean up their toys or their messes. It can be so difficult to find engaging ways to keep clean up time engaging and productive.

We had a lot of luck by incorporating math into our clean up routine plus it keeps the kids practicing their math skills. Take clean up time and turn it into a game with this simple tip. While you will need to remind your kids to clean up and maybe even start the process, this will get them helping as well.

Clean Quickly in Sets

I love asking my kids to clean up sets of toys. You might be asking why this works or even how this works. Well, it’s really quite simple. Just like writing a to-do list or setting short-term goals can help to motivate you, providing your children a cleaning to-do list and short-term goals helps motivate them. Cleaning in sets does both! The number of sets acts as the to-do list, while the size of the set is the short-term goal.

How Do You Clean in Sets?

This can be as simple as asking your child to clean up 3 sets of 10. This task seems much more manageable for a children then asking them to pick up 30 toys. They clean up 30 toys either way, but they are much more engaged and productive when cleaning up 3 sets of 10. You’ve given them the to-do list of 3 sets and the short-term goal of 10 toys.

My children love the feeling of getting 1 set completed. This feeling of accomplishment, internal motivation, goes a long way to getting that second and third set done. Moreover, they will want to share this with you and you can provide the positive praise, external motivation, they need to continue. With time, they may not need as much external motivation. Instead, they will complete bigger sets or more sets before needing to tell you what they have completed.

We love to vary the number of sets and items in each set to match the area they need to clean up. If at a quick glance, you can estimate the number of toys, this is easy. Figure out the closest multiplication fact to get to this number. These will become your sets.

So if you think there are about 40 toys on the floor, you could ask your child to clean these toys up in different ways. Maybe you want them to do 4 sets of 10 or 10 sets of 4. But if 10 is too big of a number, you could also try 8 sets of 5 or 5 sets of 8. Maybe your children wants less sets, so you ask them to do 2 sets of 20. So many ways to adjust this task to your child.

Adding in Additional Math

While most people love sets of 10 or 5, we enjoy using crazy numbers too. Why not try out sets of 2 so you can introduce binary to your child. Binary is the language of computers. 16 is another common computer set which works well with binary. Sets of 12 are great for teaching about time. Our measurement systems in America are often divided in halves, thirds, fourths, and eighths, so making sets of 2, 3, 4, and 8 could help with developing fractions too.

Subtraction

Cleaning up in sets makes it super easy to work on subtraction with your children. As they clean, they can subtract out the toys they cleaned or the sets they cleaned. For example, let’s say you asked your child to clean up 3 sets of 10. If they have cleaned up 6 toys, you could ask how many more toys they need to clean to finish a set. As they finish a set, you could ask how many more sets they need to complete.

If your child is ready for larger numbers, you could work with the total too. Take the above example where your child needs to clean up 30 toys. After asking about finish 1 set and how many sets they need to finish, you could ask how many more toys they need to finish total. You children could provide this as 2 sets and 4 toys or 24 toys. If you work with sets of 10, you can work on place value too.

Multiplication

Multiplication is so easy to build into this clean up game. You can help your child to practice any multiplication facts. We love to choose one specific difficult fact and focus on this for a few days before changing the fact. At first you might notice that you child needs to think about the total number of toys they will clean, but pretty soon they will just remember.

To add a little more challenge, I may even ask my child if he would prefer to clean up 3 sets of 7 or 4 sets of 6. You may find at first that your child simply picks the number with the smaller sets or the fewer number of items. But with practice and time, you will see them start to figure out how many total toys they would need to clean in both situations. Give them the time to figure out the total on their own. Then when they make a decision, ask them why they picked that one. Either way, they will pick up toys but this little choice gives children some extra motivation.

But to really push those multiplication facts, we push outside of just sets of 10 too. We might clean up 5 sets of 15 or 6 sets of 7. Be creative with the skills your child needs to focus on. Sometimes I ask them how many total toys they need to clean up before they start. Throughout the process, ask them how many toys they have already done both in sets and total. You can also ask them how many more sets or how many more total toys they need to clean up.

Fractions

Build in fractions too! We love asking our children how many toys they have put away in their current set. Then we turn this into both a fraction completed and a fraction still to complete. For example, if my children have picked up 3 out of the 4 toys in their set, they have cleaned up 3/4 of the set. However, they still need to complete 1/4 more. Plus this is such a great way to show a whole as a fraction. When you child completes their first set, they can quickly see that one set is the same as 4 out of 4 toys.

If they have multiple sets to complete, you can even begin work on mixed numbers. Maybe your child completed 3/4 of their first set, but you wanted them to complete 5 sets total. Then your child still needs to complete 4 1/4 sets. Or maybe your child completed 1 set of 4 and 2 more toys. So they still need to complete 3 2/4 sets. This will build the skill of adding and subtracting mixed numbers.

Clean Up Math for Younger Kids

Do you ever get frustrated watching your child pick up and put away one item at a time? You know they can clean up much more quickly if they used both hands, but they just won’t do it. Well, teaching them to clean up in sets will help with this.

For younger kids, we lower the sets and number in a set. They might clean up 5 sets of 3 or 2 sets of 5. Their hands are better set for holding 3 to 5 toys at a time, plus they often times can only count that high. We have found that when our littlest can hold the complete set of toys in their hand, they do better at this task. So if the toys are bigger, you might even only complete sets of 2, one for each hand. For smaller toys, you might try a set of 5 so long as your child can count that high.

Math For Littles

This clean up math game will help your younger children develop math skills too! Yes, you can definitely work on subtraction with them, but there are some other great skills developing as well. As they clean, your child is counting and practicing saying numbers. They are working on one to one correspondence or matching each toy with the next number. Further, they will develop cardinality or the ability to to know the number of items in a set.

With our little ones, we start small and slowly build up to more. In the beginning, your little one will need more positive praise and support, so trying smaller items in each set helps. Plus their attention is still growing, so they will need less sets too. As they grow and practice, you can slowly begin to added in more items and sets until they are able to mostly clean up their games without a lot of parent support. We find that having a visual to track their sets really helps too! You can make tallies on a dry erase board, move magnets on the fridge, or even slide beads on a bracelet.

When your child starts school age, you can add in a few more math skills. Cleaning up 2 sets of any number really helps with adding doubles for kindergarten and first grade friends. Sets of 2, 5, and 10 can also be powerful for teaching skip counting as well. And sets of 10 help with place value skills too.

Keep the Clean Up Math Game New

As with all parenting tips and tricks, they only work when your child is interested. If interest wanes, so does the usefulness of any parenting strategy. Keeping interest in the game needs variety. There are many ways you can change up the clean up math game to help keep interest and keep your child cleaning. Below are some of our favorite strategies.

Letting your children pick their number of sets or their number in a set can be super fun too. We like to allow our child to pick one or the other. Then we get to pick the other number. So if you child really wants to only clean up 2 sets, that’s fine. They just might be cleaning up sets of 20 or more depending on how many toys they need to put away. If they insist on a small set, like only sets of 3. That’s okay too, just ask them to clean up more sets. Maybe now they need to clean up 15 sets.

Changing Sets Based on Your Child’s Age

Or even asking them to clean up sets that go with their age, clean up 10 sets of your age or double your age. We love this strategy because it allows us to differentiate for each of our children. Younger children obviously clean up much less than our older children this way. And our children tend to see this as fair, so they actually like this tip too.

Sometimes we roll a dice or use a spinner to determine the sets they clean up. We love using a pocket cube so we can add our own numbers to the dice. This lets us work with larger sets and target specific multiplication facts. But if you don’t have a pocket cube, that’s okay. You can make your own dice pretty easily, repurpose a square block, or even use two or more dice. Spinners are great because you can add whichever numbers you like and all you really need is a piece of paper, paperclip and pencil. You can even change the dice or spinners out for each child.

You can also leave the number of sets open and challenge your children to clean up as many sets of 10 as they can or add a competition piece as well. Then talk about how many total they have cleaned up as they go. Plus it keeps the cleaning up game different each time. And the best part is that they will need to finish the job to figure out how many sets of 10 they had to clean up.

We’d Love for You to Connect with Us

Now to tackle my other biggest obstacle when it comes to cleaning: Matching Socks. And if you are looking for strategies to help keep your child’s room clean, head on over to 7 Tips for Teaching Kids to Clean their Own Room. We’d love for you to leave us a comment below to let us know if you found these tips helpful. And if you are interested in more tips for parents, please subscribe to our newsletter below. We send out practical solutions and tips to help solve real life problems and a few freebies too! Because who doesn’t love something free.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.