Circle the Clean Habits

Eight pictures fill the page. Four show clean habits: washing hands, brushing teeth, having a bath and a neat stack of folded clothes. The other four show messy moments: jumping in a mud puddle, dirty hands, a heap of dirty clothes and dropping litter on the ground. Your child circles each clean habit and leaves the messy ones alone.

Between ages three and five, children are learning to wash and brush with less help, and they follow a routine more easily when they understand it. Deciding whether a picture is clean or messy asks them to look closely and make a simple yes-or-no judgment, which is an early form of sorting. Drawing a closed circle also practices the round stroke they will later use for letters like o and a.

Talk about each picture before any circling. Playing in mud is not bad, so it helps to say that the next step after muddy play is washing up.