One of my goals for this year is to continue teaching my children some skills to make them more independent of me. A focus of our learning around here is to take full advantage of all the learning we can in and around the home. In addition to math, science, and languages, I feel it’s my duty to help my children learn to care for their own needs. Each month of this year, I am focusing on a different skill/chore and taking my time to instruct my children.

This isn’t earth-shattering news. These aren’t difficult skills. No doubt generations of mothers before me have been doing this since the dawn of time. I have been slowly showing and teaching my children these things since they were tiny. First it was to put away toys into baskets and bins and over the years that has evolved into doing their own laundry, loading and emptying the dishwasher, and making their own beds. As they are growing, so, too, should their level of involvement around the house.

Our kids do earn “commissions” for a few set chores each week, but the skills we are working on this year are “just because” skills. They will learn to iron “just because” it’s a wonderful life skill to know how to make your clothing look nice when you wear it.

For this practice, I let the kids use my table linens. We use cloth napkins every night at dinner. Normally, I just wash and dry them and skip the ironing. But they were easy items for the kids to use while learning about how hot the iron can get and how we work to remove wrinkles, not add more! We also talked about adding water to the iron to use steam, unplugging the iron when we are finished and never leaving the iron face down unattended while it’s hot. I also demonstrated how to open and put away the ironing board.

No one was burned here (thankfully) and none of my place mats or napkins were destroyed either. Since these photos were taken, the girls have each asked to practice ironing again. Our next step is to work on trickier clothing items. Things with sleeves and pockets.

I hope to work up to each person ironing his/her church/chapel clothes each week instead of me doing it all on Saturday! And leave it to my little moguls to figure out a way to turn this into a money-making scheme. They have already been plotting way to announce their “ironing business” {Perfectly Pressed} in our community newsletter. Oh boy!