Tuesday Toot: A Better System of Toy Rotation!

Most of you may know how this goes - you try to keep the toys in your home controlled. Little by little, they take over part of the living room, a bedroom or two, then there are some downstairs...and the list goes on. We are fortunate in that we have a "toy room" so the encroaching that occurs is minimal in other rooms.

However, our son is going to be four in a few weeks (BTW - how did that happen?) and his ripe old age has brought on some new developments. For the first time, this past weekend we heard a multitude of, "What do you want to play? or "I'm bored". We are pretty conservative in our parenting (My mother would probably laugh at that...she is a Grandma after all. She has earned her place in the world as a softie so finds our tactics to be a bit stern at times....sorry for the digression...back to task). When he wants excessive support in his play, we do our best to let him figure it out on his own. After all, our goal is that he can solve his own problems in life and ultimately, that we are not his playmate when he is fifteen - LOL!

We are pretty good about rotating our toys so that he does not have fifteen million things out at all times. My years as a teacher prepared me for this well before having children: Rotate them in and out so they don't get bored. Thus, after hearing he was bored, I went to task to improve the toy rotation system. I had read about the strategy below from a friend in Ju Ju Be's Pink Room. She has a small farmhouse and is forced to contain the toys due to space.

While he was napping, I got a few clear bins out and started putting a nice variety of toys in each. If things are themed, I tried to keep them together. For example, I put all of his "Cars" toys in one & dress up clothes went in another. We already had about 5 bins that we rotate so I also went through and made sure each of those had a nice variety. I put all "building" things in one: blocks, Wedgits, etc.

I then labeled each bin with days of the week. You could have one for each day of the week. I chose to use one big one and building toys for Monday & Tuesday, one bin for Wednesday, two more for Thursday & Friday, and then a HUGE one for Saturday & Sunday. On the specified days, they can play with everything in the bin and then it goes away and we bring the next one out.

I kicked off the new system yesterday and you would have thought it was Christmas morning around here. (Mmmm...where are those sugar cookies again?) Both of the kids loved having "special toys" and played independently for great lengths of time. When Mr. C went to bed, he asked if the toys would be there tomorrow to play with! What does that translate to???? SUCCESS!!!

Thanks Cara for a tip that pushes our current system to a new high!