Start with Your Sock Drawer

Our activity for teaching orderliness is an exercise in ordering everyone’s sock drawer. Start with your own socks. You can do it ahead of time and show them your orderly drawer and the bag of ones to donate or you can do it with the family to explain how. The process is fairly simple.
1. Empty the drawer completely and wipe it out.
2. Remove any socks that you don’t wear, either because you don’t like them, or they are worn or holey. Lifeless ones should be discarded and those that are still useful should be donated.
3. Pair the remaining socks and sort according to use.
4. Most people will “ball” their socks together but some advocate for folding or rolling a pair to be kinder to the fabric.
5. Return the socks to the drawer in an order that makes sense for your use.

Encourage the children to do this for their sock drawers. You will want to monitor the socks they choose to get rid of. Encourage them to notice their orderly drawer each time they remove socks. Explain that organizing the drawer was a project but keeping it that way requires a daily practice. At the end of the month, look at all the drawers to see how well they maintained it. According to the book, Start with Your Sock Drawer: The Simple Guide to Living a Less Cluttered Life, (published by Sphere, 2016, U.K. Copyright © Vicky Silverthorn, 2016.) this is a starter habit that will encourage orderliness in other areas as well. Next month – the underwear drawer!