Life Skills Download: Doing Laundry
Today I am introducing a new "Life Skills" digital download to add to the "Life Skills" series! If you're new here, I have dozens of digital downloads for neurodivergent families and kids in the shop. They are all free or $5 because I wanted them to be as accessible as possible. They are all based around systems we have tried and work in our home. I started the "Life Skills" series to help our daughter work through different skills that will help her in life with easy step-by-step directions so she can build good habits. Today we're tackling the skill of doing a load of laundry.
Life Skills Download: Doing Laundry | Set Up
My daughter is only 8 but learning how to do a load of laundry is an important life skill, and is something she is 100% capable of doing. She has shown interest in doing laundry so I want to lean into that and have her do it on a regular basis to build the habit. There have been times when I've asked her to take her laundry basket downstairs, and she'll take it and start putting stuff in the laundry and try to start a load. Sometimes she wants to do it herself when a specific item of clothing she wants to wear is dirty so I want to direct her how to do it correctly. I also knew people who didn't know how to do their laundry when they left for college so we're shutting that down pretty early! I created two different versions of this download. There's a physical checklist, as well as a visual version because my daughter does better with visuals. I always make sure there are two options in the downloads because everybody learns differently.
Before we got started, I put both the visual steps and the checklist on the wall in the laundry room so she can reference both. She's been leaning more towards checklists lately, but since it's laundry and it's a little bit more complicated, I am definitely going to have both. I suggest laminating these to make them more durable, but its not a necessity. I did the checklist along with the water temperature chart on one side of the laundry room, and then I put the visual steps on the other side of the laundry room. You don't need a ton of space for these and you can easily decide the placement. I like to put stuff a little bit higher because my daughter is tall, but also to prevent my 2-year-old from pulling them off the walls like he loves to do.
Life Skills Download: Doing Laundry | The Steps
Let's go through the steps and do a load of laundry. First, I had her bring her full laundry basket downstairs to the laundry room which is full of dirty clothes. She then opened up the washing machine and put everything in. I sort all of our clothes and wash them based on type of clothe, like delicates, darks, lights, heavily soiled, heavily stained, whites, etc. However, for my kids clothes I normally load them straight into the wash all together because they don't have a lot that needs to be sorted. I will eventually have her work on sorting, but it isn't something I'm worried about right now. I did create a version of the checklist and visual aids that includes sorting so you have the option to work on that if you want. If you like to sort your laundry, you can have that and if you don't care about sorting your laundry, you can have it set up that way too.
Once she's put all the clothes in, she then closed the washing machine and opened up the drawer to put the laundry detergent in. We keep our laundry detergent in an easily accessible jar on the counter making it super easy to dispense. I like it this way because it's not messy and I'm not worried about her pouring laundry detergent all over the place. Then I have her do the settings and since this is just a normal set of clothes we set it to normal. We do have to do the control lock because my two-and-a-half-yea-old likes to open up the washing machine mid-cycle or change the settings on it, and that really messes things up. Because of this, we always make sure to put the control lock on on ours.
When the washing machine is done, I had her move everything from the washer to the dryer. There were a few pieces I had her keep out to hang dry, but for the most part the kids clothes can all go in the dryer. We use free and clear laundry detergent and don't add anything because of my allergies, but we do use reusable dryer balls. Then we set the dryer to 60 minutes, turned it on and it was good to go.
Once the dryer was done, she put all of her clothes into her laundry basket. She did this the next morning and it took a minute to get everything out since our dryer is pretty deep. Once everything was out, I had her take it back upstairs to her room so we could work together to put everything away. I made sure putting things away was the last step so it’s actually included and clean clothes don't sit in a laundry basket. This is the hardest step for my daughter and she tends to get a little overwhelmed so we are working through it together. I usually sort all of her clothes with her there with me. She puts away her underwear, socks and pajamas, and then she picks to hang up her skirts and shorts or her dresses and I do the other.
This system is working really well and she's excited to learn to do her own laundry and I have the peace of mind knowing she won't go off to college not being able to do her own laundry! You can grab the download for this and all other "Life Skills" downloads in the shop!
