Getting Your Child Involved in Toy Organization (How I Conquered the Clutter!)
Fun Stuff, Parenting — By Lindsey on January 31, 2012 at 1:00 am
Okay, I don’t have a “before” photo for you, but I’m sure you can use your imagination and picture in your mind what it looked like. Legos, play food, small animals, stuffed animals everywhere in Emma’s room! I was trying to keep all of her toys in her little wooden IKEA toy box, and it so wasn’t working. First, not all her toys would fit in it, and second, she didn’t play with any of her toys because they were too hard to find! You know you need to do some organizing or go through your toys and get rid of some stuff when that happens. So that’s what I did. First, I went through the toys, and discovered that we don’t really have too many – it’s just that she has a lot of play sets with small pieces that are hard to keep together.
Off I went to Target to grab some plastic Sterilite bins with lids. Then we went through Emma’s toys and sorted them into the bins by category. Anything that couldn’t be sorted we thought long and hard about how necessary it was and then put it in a bag to go to our local thrift store.
I made labels in Photoshop (you can use Microsoft Word, too) with pictures so Emma could easily keep her toys organized (I can dream, right?). I let her help me put the labels on, asking her which label went onto which box, and she really liked taping the labels to the boxes herself.
(I have to tell the perfectionist in me to chill about straight labels for this reason…)
I was glad to see how proud Emma was of our accomplishment. :)
I was actually able to vacuum the floor after this! ;-)
Yes, that’s Emma actually playing with her Legos! Yay! (haha)
We may not have dealt with all the clutter in her room, but the majority of it is taken care of now. :) I need to go back for one more bin so we can put Emma’s Little People and accessories in it, then we’re good! Ah, it’s so nice when your kids have a clean floor. :)
Do you have any suggestions or tips on dealing with clutter in kids’ rooms?
5 Comments
I love that you let her help put the sticker on and organize with you. We purchased our toddler a case with six squares and canvas buckets that go in them. I tried keeping things organized, but after fifty-bazillion attempts I gave up, and ‘clean-up’ just now means sure you’re putting everything in a blue bucket, lol.
Haha, I so know how that happens! One of the things that saves me is that each bin has a lid and they’re not that easy to get off. I know if I had one of those organizers like you have (and I really like those!) it would be too tempting to take everything out at once.
One of the rules I have is that she can only take one bin out at once (unless she wants to take a few animals out to play with the legos). It’s just so much easier that way. Let’s hope this holds up over time… I’m sure I’ll have to re-organize it all every once in awhile.
You are sooooooooooooo right about everything getting dumped at once. That happens all of the time (ugh!). I love the idea of lids that don’t come off easy for tots, that’s perfect!
I am doing the same thing here today- cleaning the clutter! I am doing the similar thing- organizing boxes or certian kinds of toys. I am also selling what we hardly use or putting things in the attic they have grown out of. I got the sterilite bins that have pull out drawers and put them in their closets- since there isn’t space under their beds. The last thing I am doing is building an extra shelf right above my daughters top one that will become our linen place- since we don’t have a linen closet. I am about 1/2 way through! Yay!
It was very smart to get cases with lids she (and Isaac) can’t get off. So much easier! We have various sorting and organizing methods: wooden rack w/ bins, boxes with lids, and baskets. The ones with lids work best, though the bins are the cutest and look best in their rooms. I’ve found that the openness of the bins encourages them to dump, dump, dump and also allows them to clean up by just throwing things into random bins without paying attention to what goes where.
I’m on a major toy purging binge right now in prep for a move to a smaller house and have been moving a lot of things into boxes with lids from baskets and shelves. I’m planning to keep only 3 boxes in each bedroom when we move and the rest in the garage. I’ll rotate them out every couple of weeks. The kids have been amazingly cooperative -we’ve already cleared out 4 garbage bags full of toys. But we still have way too many toys. Some of it (like our Little People stuff) is just too babyish for them, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because I know Jaxon will be playing with it in a year or so.
I need to make some labels like you did for your boxes and get the kids more involved in the sorting of toys- maybe it would help them keep things organized better.
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