Organizing Shapes Young Minds

NJ Expert Organizer, Marilyn Shain Labendz recommends teaching organization early

We are taught to organize at a very young age. Remember cubbies?

A great deal of the time the concept of putting things where they belong isn't carried over at home because life can be frenzied, and why add more stress?

This is the time for grandparents, baby sitters, aunts and uncles to help make organizing a fun game.

Here are some of the "games" that I've played with my own children and now my pre-K4 and first grade granddaughters:

Kitchen activities:
Putting away the utensils after they are cleaned and dried. Even 3 year olds can learn to see the difference between soup and tea spoons. Details: not the knives.
Stacking metal and/or wood mixing bowls.
Laundry activities:
Make mountains out of towels, not molehills!...colored mountains and white mountains.
Putting away clothing in the proper drawer. Take a photo of them in pajamas, pants, shirts, etc, (or find photos in a magazine). Tape the images in the drawer so they can locate them if they don't read yet.
Perhaps you have a hamper with divisions. Let them toss their own clothes to be laundered in the appropriate sections.
Library activities: Shelving, piles or cubbies:
Story books
Pop up books
Animal books
Chapter books
Tall books, short books

NJ expert organizer, Marilyn Shain Labendz, suggests teaching young children to organize through games

One of my fondest memories is going to Aunt Gertie's house and counting the pennies in the jar in her cabinet.

I recently took this memory and shared it with my granddaughters and took it to a new level.

We divided the coins from the charity box into 2 piles, one for each of the girls.
We made manageable stacks of each type of coin. (10 dimes, 2 piles of 10 nickels, etc)
We counted the coins, and the older one, the first grader, counted up the amount of money in each pile and wrote down how much in each. Then we did the math and totaled up the coins.

Next visit we are going to decide how much we want to donate to different charities. What a discussion that will be!