“Clean up, clean up
Everybody, everywhere
Clean up, clean up
Everybody do your share”

If you have a little one you may be familiar with that little jingle made famous by a purple dinosaur.  It’s a little song that you sing when it’s time to clean up with children.  It worked great…until my kids turned 3.  Then they realized they had an opinion.

I hate to clean and picking up is the last thing I want to do at the end of a day.  I owe a huge apology to all of my college roommates because, looking back, I was a very messy roommate.  Unfortunately, I have passed this on to my children…as you can see in this video below.

Our clutter finally was more than we could handle so today we went into clean up mode.  It was like pulling teeth to get the kids to help clean up their rooms.  I get it! I didn’t want to be doing that either. And it’s very overwhelming to look at a messy room and think you have to start working on it. After telling Rilyn for the umpteenth time that she needed to start picking stuff up, I finally had a lightbulb moment.

I downloaded the Random Number Generator + app.  The reason I chose this app was because it does random generations of numbers, dice and colors.  But there are several out there to choose from.  So, I gave Rilyn my phone and told her to choose either numbers or colors and she had to pick up whatever the phone told her to.  If the app generated a 3, she would pick up three items.  If the app generated the color purple, then she would have to find a purple item to pick up.

This transformed clean up time for us!  She became engaged in the process and excited to see what number or color would come up.

It was also a homeschooling win-win because we worked on counting, adding (there is a dice feature – so she had to add the dice up) and organizing (home ec!).

Do you have a clean-up time trick with your kids?  Or a tip for someone with messy tendencies like me?  Comment below!