Make Your Own Household Cleaners

Welcome to week 2 of our 8 Week Summer Boredom Buster series.  You can find week 1 here.

This week’s summer boredom buster idea is making homemade household cleaners with your kids.  A little like cooking, kids and parents can have a lot of fun mixing ingredients together and seeing what new colors, consistencies, and textures the mixed ingredients turn into. 

In addition to fun, making your own household cleaners is also a great way to sneak in some summer learning.  Use the opportunity to talk about the environment and how cleaning molecules breakdown dirt.  And once your cleaners are made, you can use them as well as any commercially made cleaners you may have to do some effectiveness tests or to see which ones can break down Jell-O.  Parents can also sneak in some math by working with the kids to compare costs and time of their homemade cleaners to the ones purchased in the store.

Start by taking on only one cleaner at first to save a little money on supplies and to ease initial confusion.  You can make more than one batch of the same cleaner (for example one for the bathroom and one for the kitchen) so that all of the kids have a chance to mix.  If you and your kids enjoyed it, you can always do more later. 

To find recipes, you can use online homemade house cleaner recipes or borrow the book, Clean House Clean Planet by Karen Logan from your local library.  This book is filled with a lot of great information on how to make many different types of cleaners, where to buy the supplies, and how cleaners work.  Another great option is to make your own laundry detergent.  Trent over at SimpleDollar.com has done a lot of research on how to make your own laundry detergent and can walk you through the entire process. 

Once you decide which cleaner to make,  work a time into your family calendar or mom planner to buy the supplies and sit down together to mix your cleaners.  Once your household cleaner is made, work with the kids to design a creative label for your bottle.  Be sure to come up with a jazzy name for your cleaner and include the recipe on the label so that you can easily re-make the cleaner in the future.  If you have a child who enjoys computers this may be a good opportunity for them to get creative and use their computer skills.

And last but not least, once your cleaners are made put them to the test by letting the kids use them to clean stains, fingerprints, or even better the bathroom!

Good luck!