Getting Dressed, Not Stressed!
If you grew up watching A Christmas Story, chances are you have reached the point in life where you relate more to the mother than any other character. The scene where she is breaking a sweat just getting her young son dressed for a walk to school in the cold is, for many of us, far more relatable than the main character’s desperation for a certain Christmas toy.
However, who dressed him up to walk home? Or for recess? It must have been his teacher and it must have taken her ages to do that with twenty other similarly helpless young kids. In fact, during the winter months it was likely no small miracle that she was able to teach them at all considering the time spent simply preparing them for the elements.
See where we’re going with this?
Getting dressed is hard, even if you don’t involve zippers and gloves and hats. Little hands are still learning all those fine motor skills and it is often so much quicker and completely understandable when a mother (guilty over here!) says, “Please just let me do this so we aren’t late… again.”
And also, we need to give our little ones the opportunity to practice getting dressed. Even if we set aside the benefits of struggling with a task, practicing, persevering, and eventually mastering it triumphantly (what a victory for a four year old!). The practicality of encouraging our little ones to get dressed independently, with ample support while needed, is that they get to play outside for longer.
The benefits of outdoor play, especially in the winter months, are various and compelling and will be outlined in a future blog post for anyone who isn’t quite convinced yet. We want our preschoolers to get as much fresh air, free play, and sunshine as possible. And in order to do that, we need to get them ready for the great outdoors as efficiently as possible.
So with that, here are five tips, and a couple videos, to help encourage independence with the most dreaded of winter tasks: getting dressed.
Dip & Flip
Keychain on Zipper
Practice without Pressure
This is Hard! (And That’s Okay)
Take Turns
Dip & Flip
This is a great trick that our teachers have already practiced with your kiddos and that will help them learn which arm goes in which sleeve. Check out the video below to see what it looks like in action.
Key Chain on Zipper
Once the coat is on, it needs to get zippered. This is likely the trickiest of all the getting dressed tasks. One way to make it easier is to make the zipper larger. This will not eliminate that first step of getting it in just right but it will make it easier to find the zipper and eventually pull it up. You can find durable and aDORable zipper attachments by searching for “kid zipper pulls” on Amazon or click here to see a set we like.
Practice without Pressure
The last thing any of us needs is another delay while trying to get everyone out the door. Therefore, practicing these skills is not ideal when we are in a rush or even need to be anywhere in a remotely timely fashion. Instead, practice the dip & flip, the zipper pulling up, the gloves on, the hat on as a part of play time. Here are some ideas:
Race the clock: How many times can you dip & flip before the song ends?
Get your stuffed animals dressed: Your little one plays “grown up” and gets a big stuffed animal dressed in her coat, including zippers
Get ME dressed: You switch roles, you are the kid and your child needs to help you remember what order everything needs to go on. This is your chance to be silly! Put your gloves on your feet, your shoes on your hands, your coat on your legs. Make it fun and they will LOVE correcting you.
We found this getting dressed practice kit that is small enough to travel in the car, or be a part of a busy bag.
This is Hard, and That’s Okay
Let’s face it, life can actually be pretty tricky when you’re in preschool. You’re learning a lot of new things, you can barely hold your crayon the right way, and using scissors?? Forget about it! There are so many daily challenges for our little ones that adding another one to the mix can feel daunting. Of course, the solution isn’t that they don’t need to learn these things, rather the lesson is that learning new things can be tough and we can get frustrated and try again, and all these feelings are normal and just a part of being a person (or in Elmo’s case, a monster). Watch Elmo struggle in this great clip from Sesame Street below and show it to your little one when she starts to feel frustrated, too.
Take Turns
While frustration is normal, we want to avoid allowing our feelings to become a meltdown. That’s why we encourage practicing a “getting dressed” task for a set period of time, and then it’s YOUR turn. Framing it this way helps keep our young learners from feeling like they failed to get it done or get it right. The goal is not necessarily to get the zipper up all the way or the glove on all the fingers, the goal is to practice! When the timer is up, they can choose to keep trying, or it can be your turn. We want to praise their effort and consider their “sticktoitiveness” the goal. After all, at the end of the day, they are still learning how to learn! And a big part of that is practicing hard things, persevering, and gaining more independence, one zipper at a time.
