Clear the Table After a Family Dinner

Series Summary

Being a mom or dad is a lot of work and running the household, ensuring that not only the children are well fed but guests also can be confusing. Meal time can be an especially stressful time in the house if you are not sure how much food to give your toddler or elementary child - let alone how to keep them in their seats. Do not fret, home economics lessons have just become free and available at your home computer. If you would like to learn home economics tips and techniques such as making kid friendly meals and hot cocoa from scratch, learn for free from one of our experts online.

In this free online video series learn meal time tips and techniques from expert home ec instructor, Lisa Krone. Learn how to set the table before a meal and how to clear the table after a meal. Watch these videos and learn how much food to give your toddler or spouse and how to keep your children in their seats enjoying the meal you have prepared.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Lisa Krone and I am here with Best Epicurean on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today we are going to talk about having your children help out with one of the daily chores that actually are kind of big, which is clearing the table. This is my son Scott and he is 13 and basically, we had a bit of a meal here. He certainly from the time he was a little boy, has been able to help clear the table, so he is pretty much an expert at this point but we are going to walk through the stages. So the first thing that Scott is going to want to do is he is going to want to take the plates that have food on them and he is going to want to use maybe utensils that is left on the plate to help clear into the trash. So I put the trash over here where it is nice and handy and he can reach it. A lot of you keep the trash under your sink so you are going to want to pull that out to make it easier and Scott is going to dump the items that are on that plate; we don’t have anything there that the dog will eat or can be put away. It is nice if you can leave it for your dog or any of your animals that you have who eat floor food and/or people food and he is going to put it right there in the sink. The other things that you want to look at are these kinds of things, especially if maybe you might run out quickly after dinner or something like that. You want to go to items like mayonnaise that should be put away right away so I am going to hand these items to him; this is jelly that can out a little bit longer, no big deal. Even your juice can stay out a little bit longer but for little ones, they may not be able to take all three at once so you want to give them a little bit at a time because you don’t want them to have a situation where they might drop it or not know where to put it or need help. So while Scott is putting those away, I am going to take a look at the other things that are on the table. I like my table completely clear after a meal and I like the dishes in the sink so that one of them, whoever’s turn it is that month to do the dishes, is all together. Basically we are going to start collecting all the paper items and if you recycle, just make sure that you rinse out your cups so you can recycle them. So Scott, can you grab those? We are not going to recycle those but make sure your cups are empty of liquid because if not, then you are going to run into a problem and your garbage is going to get kind of nasty. What I will do is I usually expect that he will stack them up like this and anything leave coasters or what not, you can leave these here. People are still drinking or visiting with you, you can leave their cups on the table and you don’t have to recycle those until the end of the night and that’s how you clear the table."