If your days revolve around the cleaning, cleaning and more cleaning, it’s time to employ a helping hand. You can literally cut your household chores in half just by getting your kids in on the act! It may sound like a tough ask, but trust us; once your kids have played Kidspot’s fun cleaning games they’ll be begging you for more chores. Who knew sweeping and dusting could be so exciting?

Here are our top five cleaning games for kids – and don’t forget to keep track with a cute chore chart:

Cleaning game # 1 – Broom dancing

Crank up the stereo, put on some disco clothes, thrust a broom into the hands of your eager offspring and dance your way through the dust! Sweeping and vacuuming can be one heck of a fun chore – it can provide endless hours of joy if it’s done in time to the beat of your favourite tune. Allow each child to pick a song and an area of the house to sweep or vacuum and watch your home transform before your very eyes.

Cleaning game # 2 – The de-clutter train

All aboard for cleaning fun! With a little bit of forward planning, this will be the cleaning game of choice come Sunday evening! Assign a colour to each bedroom, and then buy a storage bin (on wheels) in each colour. Each bin acts as a train carriage that gets pushed through the house collecting items that need to be packed away. Anything that is lying around the house gets picked up and placed into a coloured bin, depending on which bedroom it belongs in. Once the bins are full – or all the clutter is cleared – the train then delivers everything back to its home. As the train pulls into a ‘station’, the driver empties the bin and puts each item away in the correct place.

Not keen on buying plastic storage bins? Then use cardboard boxes instead. Kids can use poster paint to colour each box in the required hue!

Cleaning game # 3 – Paint the dirt away

Cleaning windows and glass doors can be a thankless task. But give your kids a paint brush and a bucket of warm soapy water, and they won’t be able to stop thanking you! Encourage them to paint away the dirt on the outside of your windows with lots of soapy suds. Once they are done, simply turn on the hose and allow them to wash away their artwork. This fool-proof way of incorporating ‘wet paint’ water play and housework means that you will be able to cross another chore off your very long list.

Cleaning game # 4 – The great laundry race

As the ‘race caller’, your only job during ‘The great laundry race’ is to stand outside the laundry door and shout out a colour or two, like  ‘blue’ or ‘pink’. Then watch your children sprint into their rooms, dive into their laundry baskets and pick out dirty laundry items in the requested colours. The winner is the child who makes it back to the laundry first, with two piles of laundry correctly colour-sorted.

Cleaning game # 5 – I Spy … a clean table

After dinner, coax your troops into helping clear away the dirty plates with a sneaky game of I Spy.  Take it in turns to ‘spy’ things on the table that need cleaning and need to be put away. Whoever does the ‘spying’ removes the item from the table as soon as someone guesses it, and puts it in the sink, dishwasher or back in the refrigerator. With this cleaning game, dirty dishes will be whisked off the table before you can say ‘pass the salt’. And suddenly this nightly chore won’t seem so bad.