How Do Dinosaurs Clean Their Room?

If you visit my house in the summer, chances are you will see a house that is pretty much a mess.  There are usually beach towels hanging somewhere, kids pajamas on the family room floor, and countless other toys scattered across the house.  Why does it get this way?  I try to do as much as possible to enjoy our short summers, and I refuse to spend my summer cleaning.

I can usually handle the mess for a week or two and then I start to get crazy.  This summer I noticed that there were just a lot of things that the boys could help me out with and they weren't, so this week I put them in charge of making sure their room was clean.  My six year old is very good at this, but my three year old could use some help.  He is one of those kids that wants to change his clothes 5 times a day and then leave the clothes all over the floor.

So, on one of my fed up days I ordered the book Cleaning House by Kay Wills Wyma and started getting some ideas.    You can check out her blog and great year long experiment at The MOAT Blog.

I loved her idea of using a jar of dollar bills to help kids keep their rooms clean.  Since my boys are a little young, I decided to fill their jars up with 28 quarters (4 quarters a day, for a week).  They had four things they needed to do to keep their quarters.  If they forgot one we would take a quarter away when we checked their room at night.  They did a great job all week and spent the 3 minutes they needed to to pick up their room at night.

We kept an easy list close at hand to remember what the four things were that they needed to do.  I made this adorable custom writing paper at DLTK - Growing Together.  You can choose what image you want and what kind of lines.  I know I will be using this paper a LOT!

I knew we needed to let the boys check on us since we were checking on them, so the boys even checked our room and got to take a quarter away if we didn't do one of our "chores."  The second day I did not make the bed and they had SO much fun taking our quarter away!

You may be wondering why we chose dinosaur paper for our chore lists...it is because I found a dinosaur book on their shelves as we were keeping the rooms clean!  We read, How Do Dinosaurs Clean Their Rooms? by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague many times.  This is a fun board book that reminds kids to NOT put their dirty socks back in drawers!  I especially like the picture at the end of the book with a VERY clean room!  Each time we read it, I point out how nice the dinosaur's room looks and how nice their room looks now that they are working so hard to keep them clean.

Our plan for our first week of keeping our rooms clean was to go buy the family a couple of pet fish with all of our quarters that we kept in our jar.  The fish and the quarters kept us all motivated throughout the week.

Next week, we tackle the downstairs AND the bedrooms!  Baby steps!  Baby steps!

We would love it if you followed along with our reading adventures through our Facebook page!