Socks!

When my kids were little we seemed to have socks everywhere!

When they were still wearing socks with cuffs (that roll down at the ankle) we would mark each sock with a line about 1/4" long using a Sharpie marker. 1 mark meant it belonged to the oldest kid, 2 marks, 2nd oldest and as the kids handed down the socks we just added a line to show who it belonged to now. Every now and then we'd go over fading marks. But this really made sock sorting go MUCH easier.

Anything from the dryer without a match went in to the Sock Bucket (a wash tub or whatever container we were using at the time). Occasionally we would need a "time out" activity and someone would sort for a certain amount of time or until they had a specified number of matches.  If the bucket started to get full and nobody had been on sock matching duty, we'd dump them in the middle of the floor and have races to see who could get the most matches in 5 minutes.

Again, when the kids were little and I was more concerned about their socks matching their outfit, I even put baskets into their closet and sorted the clean socks by color. Labeling the buckets gave the pre-readers some practice at seeing the color written in context with that color socks inside the basket.

Kid laundry

Teaching kids to sort laundry is a time consuming skill that takes practice. If we start when they are young, they won't end up wearing pink (supposed to be white) T-shirts when they leave home and go off to college. Doing laundry is something that kids can begin helping with at a young age and working up to doing it on their own.

To encourage my kids to sort their clothes as they took it off instead of waiting until laundry day, I put 4 hampers in their bathroom. Labeled with: red, white, dark and light.

Then instead of doing laundry just once a week, we make it part of our daily routine. The child in charge of the laundry zone (our chores are divided into zones) gets 1 hamper from the bathroom, adds any adult's clothes of that color to the bucket and then starts the laundry before breakfast. At lunch time the laundry person moves the clothes to the dryer, and before they play after school work is done, they are responsible to sort the clothes and lay neatly on the couch so everyone can put away their own clothes.