As part of encouraging the kiddos to participate more in our household tasks, I have been making different routine cards for them. We are preparing to, sometime in the near future move onto our school bus, at least for a while to travel, and while we are on the bus we definitely won’t have a dishwasher. I have been washing dishes 100% by hand since January 1st, and I have to say it has helped me to have a cleaner sink area—I actually think it takes less of my time than dealing with the dishwasher too.
But I also wanted the children to be involved in the dishwashing process. Previously I would have them help load and unload, which was fine-ish. Now I have transitioned to asking them to do an age appropriate amount of handwashing each day. One way I make this easy is by keeping the sink clean, and preparing a 3 basin washing station each morning, and refreshing it as necessary. What does this mean? On the counter to the left of the sink, previously where our overflow of the dirty dishes would spill out of the sink, I have a 16 quart Sterlite “sweater box” container filled with warm water. Here is where we put our dirty dishes. In front of it I gave a much smaller container for silverware and small items (so they don’t get lost in the bottom of the larger bin).
In the sink itself I have another sweater container, filled with hot water. This basin is rinsing the dishes, so we don’t have to constantly turn on the sink (in our bus we will have at least 100 gallon water tank, but I am skeptical of how long it will realistically last for a family of 6–plus I want to practice as much water conservation as I can, and sometimes the kids use SO MUCH water—honestly).
Lastly on a metal shelf riser that sits in our sink, I have another sweater container with cool water and a splash of bleach. I know, bleach! But did you know bleach is approved by OMRI as an organic produce wash? Bleach is only stable for about 4 hours and then it breaks down. That’s why if you gave chlorine in your tap water you can leave it out overnight and the chlorine will dissipate (not true for other things in tap water though, unfortunately). This really helps our dishes get that final sparkly rinse clean and helps to sterilize everything—just to be sure it’s getting clean. You could use vinegar as a rinse aid as well.
Then we have a drying rack where everything sits until it air dries. This is important, especially with bleach. It’s not clean until it’s dried!
Have this system set up makes it easy for the kids to come along, grab a few dishes from bin #1, scrub them with soap, dip them in bin #2, and then dip in bin #3. Clean! Then they just set them up on the rack to dry. After they’ve done a few dishes, they use their laminated cards to check off the number they did. They don’t have to do them all at one time, and truthfully some days it does not happen. But we try to do it every day and like all the things, the more we do it, the easier it gets.
For reference, Cookie is 6 and has 10 boxes to check, Apple is 4 and has 5 boxes to check, and at 2 Noodle has just one big box to check. Usually he sort of half does anywhere between 1-5 items, but usually I do need to go back and redo these dishes, or he puts them back in the dirty water, or… a million other toddler things might happen. But he gets great joy out of scribbling in his one big checkbox. As do the bigger kids! They feel a ton of satisfaction seeing the checkboxes fill up, which is so great! It is just an intrinsic reward made visible.
In fact I am planning to add checkmark boxes to more of our routine cards, just because they enjoy them so much, and it also works as a reminder. Then I just go around and wipe them clean in the evening after they go to bed (or during bedtime once we’re past any chore doing) or if I forget, in the morning at breakfast time (before we’ve entered into any choring).
I made color coded borders on our cards to match the kids other cards (these cards don’t feature my own image like many of our other routine cards), laminated them and then used Velcro dots to put them on the dishwasher. I used Velcro dots so the cards can easily be removed so that I can still clean the dishwasher. This is how I am doing all of our routine cards. When I need to take them down permanently I will just use a little orange oil or orange oil based degreaser to remove the adhesive. The Velcro dots aren’t very expensive but of course I do hope I don’t have to remove them too often—we will see how well they hold up to the cleaning supplies I use around them.
P.S. I buy almost all of my cleaning supplies from Azure Standard which we ABSOLUTELY love. Saves this busy mom so much time and money, and helps support a better, cleaner, healthier world too!