Learn to wash clothes by hand

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers.

Setting up this activity

• You need to gather items of dirty washing. You may want people to bring small, safe items of clothing to be washed, such as worn socks.
• You could also gather a few clean items yourself, then make them dirty, such as by spilling a safe juice or putting some mud on them.
• Make sure to check for any allergies, such as to certain washing tablets, then make adjustments as needed.
• The washing powder may irritate some people’s skin, especially if they have a medical condition, such as eczema. You may wish to provide washing up gloves for people to use.

Prepare your washing station

1. Gather everyone together and tell them that they’re going to learn how to wash clothes without a washing machine.
2. Ask everyone to get into small teams and select a few items of dirty clothing to wash.
3. The teams should separate the dirty clothes into four piles, using the following categories ‘Whites’, ‘Lights’, ‘Brights’ or ‘Darks’.
4. If a team doesn’t have one of the categories, that’s OK. 
5. Alternatively, each team could be responsible for one of the categories. For example, one team could do ‘Darks’, one team could do ‘Lights’ and so on. 
6. Each team needs two buckets per clothes pile, as one is for washing and one is for rinsing. 
7. Someone should fill the buckets with warm water, so each is around three-quarters full. The water shouldn’t be too hot as it could burn your hands or shrink your clothes. An adult may need to help carry the full buckets.
8. Someone else should add washing powder to half of the buckets. Always follow the instructions on the packet to know how much to add. 
9. The other half of the buckets should contain warm water only.

Start washing

1. Before people start washing, tell everyone not to scrub, twist, or rub the clothes in the water, as this can damage them.
2. Each team may want to split up further to be able to work on all the piles of clothing at the same time. 
3. Submerge a pile into the bucket that contains washing powder.
4. Everyone can use a clean wooden spoon to move the clothes around. They should be fully soaked in the water.
5. Soak the clothes for two or three minutes, or until the clothes start to look clean. Don’t leave anything in for more than four minutes as this can lead to shrinkage.
6. Carefully take the clothes out of the washing powder bucket and move them into the bucket containing only warm water. 
7. Again, people should use a wooden spoon to move the clothes around to help remove the washing powder. This bucket may need to be emptied and refilled with clean, warm water if the clothes are still soapy after a few minutes.
8. Hang the clothes out to dry. You could use an airer, or create a washing line between trees using string or rope.